


growing roots

by QueenOfTheWesternSky



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Found Family, Gen, Other Characters Make Minor Appearances Or Are Mentioned - Freeform, Yuri Plisetsky-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-12-07
Packaged: 2019-08-22 01:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16588370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfTheWesternSky/pseuds/QueenOfTheWesternSky
Summary: "...it’s not the family he thinks Dedushka was picturing for him, but many years from now he will be in an apartment in Saint Petersburg, banishing the former living legend of figure skating from the kitchen as he attempts to instruct an anxious foreigner and a stoic one on how to make katsudon flavoured pirozhki while a fiery haired woman drinks and laughs at them. It’s not the family Dedushka might have pictured for him, but it is a good one."or;snapshots of yuri plisetsky and ten people who shaped him as a person, whether he liked it or not.





	1. Nikita Ledovskoy

He doesn’t remember not knowing Nikita Ledovskoy, but that doesn’t make her any less of a stranger. For a while, in Russia at least, Nikita was a household name, and Yuri Plisetsky was a footnote to the immensity of her life.

He’s four when his father dies, and when he loses his mother all the same. Yuri doesn’t remember much before that, which is to say he doesn’t remember her, or his father. There are moments when he thinks he does; a sight, a sound, a smell, but more often than not, these are traced back to his Dedushka. And the rest he has no way of knowing if they were ever real, or if they were the dreaming of a lonely child.

But what he does remember is this:

  * Constant promises that she would be home soon
  * The shrill sound of the rotary phone in Dedushka’s kitchen ringing
  * The sterile smell of a hospital waiting room
  * The feeling of suffocating as he’s forced into a suit for the funeral
  * And finally, her leaving without any promise of returning at all.



 

He’s eight before he sees her again. Dedushka calls him down from his room with a hesitance reserved for bad news and uncomfortable conversations. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, hands clasped around a mug of coffee. She’s cut her hair off and Yuri resolves then to grow his out. She looks like a stranger; ludicrously out of place surrounded by the normality of Dedushka’s kitchen. She could be anyone; anyone’s mother. Not his. She didn’t have to be his anything.

Yuri spends a moment perfectly still at the bottom of the stairs wondering if he could dash back upstairs and hide under his bed. But they both look on expectantly, so he slowly approaches. He doesn’t sit at the table in his usual spot until Dedushka asks him to, and Nikita doesn’t speak until then.

“Yurochka.” She says, and Yuri flinches. It’s too familiar, he doesn’t know her. He never knew her; she wasn’t there before she abandoned him and she wasn’t thereafter. He looks at her again, appraisingly, and reminds himself _she could be anyone’s mother._

“Yuri.” He corrects, sitting up straight in his chair in the hopes it will make him seem older. More in charge. He doesn’t _want_ to feel like a child around her; to feel vulnerable. She hasn’t earned that, and with Yuri Plisetsky, everything must be earned.

Dedushka scowls at him. “ _Yura.”_ His voice warns, but Yuri squirms in his seat and does not relent. He does not know this woman; she does not get to pretend that he does.

“No, Nikolai, it’s fine. I deserve that. Yuri, then.” She concedes, and Yuri does his best not to preen. “I was the one who wasn’t here, so it’s only fair he sets the terms.” The phrasing makes him feel rather like a grown up—even if Dedushka is watching carefully over his shoulder, like at any moment the house of cards they resided in could come crashing down.

He can’t remember if she’s aged much; her face had always been blurry in his memories, the only consistent was a halo of pale blonde hair. In the posters and the advertisements though, her face was steeled into something else. He didn’t recognise that woman either.

“I know I haven’t been here, and that is…not okay, Yuri. It wasn’t okay for me to leave you here with your Dedushka. I was just so _sad_ after your Dad died, I didn’t think I could take care of you anymore, and I wanted someone to take good care of you—you deserved that.” She speaks, and Yuri wants to be suspicious of every word she says. He commands himself to be. But everything she says sounds _right,_ so maybe he shouldn’t be. “And I know that it’s complicated and you like living here with your Dedushka, but I thought maybe we could stay in contact. Maybe, I could call sometimes and we could talk? And write letters? Dedushka tells me you’re taking skating lessons, maybe we could talk about that.”

He shifts uncomfortably where he sits for a moment, staring at her hands clasped around the coffee cup and the ring on one of them. Then he glances up at Dedushka, who offers the smallest of nods—hesitant, tentative, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to take it back. “Maybe that would be okay, I guess.”

And for a while it is. It is okay. She calls once or twice a week on the rotary phone in the kitchen, and Yuri scoots one of the chairs from the kitchen table over and talks to her. At first, they say very little—she asks questions, and Yuri answers with one or two words. But as the weeks go past, he begins telling her about school, and about skating, and how he has a _coach_ now, about the older skaters who share the ice with him; about Mila who seems alright, and about Viktor who he’s going to beat someday, he’s sure of it!

She occasionally sends letters, and he tries back to practice his hand writing—sometimes he draws pictures in the margins of the letters. Mostly of cats or ice skates. He tells her that he might be in a competition next year, and that Coach Feltsman thought he might win.

Nikita— _Mama_ —drops by for lunch one Sunday, and Yuri smiles when he sees her, hugs her around her legs because it’s all he can reach. She leaves and her purse is still sitting on the coffee table in the cozy living room. He doesn’t think anything of looking at it. The button pops open and Yuri is faced with a photo full of smiling faces. One of them he recognises instantly; Mama, but the others are foreign.

A man with his arm around her shoulders, and swaddled in her arms is a baby with inky dark hair.

This time he remembers his whole life coming crashing down; when his father died, he was too young, could barely piece together the senseless tragedy that had made wreckage of his life—it hadn’t been a perfect life, but it had been one all the same.

But this he will remember his whole life long. The realisation that when ~~Mama~~ _Nikita_ had told him that she couldn’t take care of _him,_ it was exactly that. Him. He had been the issue in that equation, not her. Clearly not her. Because there she was smiling at him from the photo holding a baby—a brother? Sister?—one that she had clearly wanted more than she’d ever wanted him.

Yuri is almost nine when he learns that as a person, he is disposable, but that doesn’t mean he will be as a skater.

 

He is thirteen and entering the Junior World Championships; he is a force of nature on the ice and finally, _finally_ he gets to prove to someone that he wasn’t all talk. That as a skater, he has _worth,_ he is something to be _valued._

Yakov says he will win the Championships without any problems; that he is talented beyond measure, and more importantly he is hardworking beyond belief.

It pays off in the form of a sponsorship for children’s skates. Yuri is _thrilled_ because this means finally, at long last, he can help his Dedushka pay their bills. Yuri knew it had never been in his plan to end up responsible for a young child at his age; his son was young and healthy and should have lived a long life with his own son, if not for that car. It hadn’t been easy, but it took a long time before Yuri realised they were poor. He thought that the sacrifices they made were normal, that everyone lived the way they did. How was he to know?

But now it doesn’t matter, the sponsor will bring in enough money for Yuri’s training, and new skates, and Dedushka’s bills for a while at least!

He comes home from training a week before he flies out for the Championship, and finds Nikita sitting at the kitchen table again, just like last time. She doesn’t look any different, and despite what he’d considered, looking her in the eyes, he doesn’t feel bad for cutting her off.

The letters had been burned in the fireplace without being opened, and when she called, Yuri refused to come to the phone. At first his Dedushka had been angry with him for it; until he screamed through frustrated tears that he knew all about her _other_ family with her _other_ child—the one she liked enough to stick around for.

After that, Dedushka had stopped trying to make him come to the phone. She still called, for a while. More than once, Yuri overheard a hushed voice tell her, “ _he doesn’t want to speak to you, Nikita, he needs time._ ”

It had been five years and still he needed time. Yuri Plisetsky could hold a grudge like nothing else. His judgement was swift, and his forgiveness practically a thing of myth. He didn’t offer second chances, not after her.

“Yuri, I—” She rises to her feet, the chair scraping back against the tiles, and Yuri _bolts_ past her and up the stairs. His bedroom door is slammed behind him. Neither of them tries to follow him, and he feels more than a little betrayed that Dedushka even let her in the house to begin with.

Once he stops wanting to cry, he eases the door open, careful not to let it squeak. It was an old house after all, and everything squeaked. He pads carefully down the stairs—just enough to listen, but not to be seen.

“—I heard he’d gotten a sponsorship deal with that skating company.”

His Dedushka made a disgusted noise. “So that’s it, is it? You’re only his mother when it suits you? When you get something out of it? What did you think? You’d waltz right in here, apologise and Yuri would just hand over his sponsorship money?”

“You know it’s not like that—,”

“Are you sure about that? You lied to him, for months. You could have told him about your family, but you didn’t. You could have avoided all of this, but you didn’t. You don’t get to be a parent just when it’s convenient for you, Nikita.”

“Being a parent is _never_ convenient--,”

“I’m glad to see your little girl has taught you _something,_ because you certainly never learned it from Yuri—my Yuri. It is too late to come here and pretend that you didn’t miss the opportunity to know your son. Because he is _amazing,_ he is going to take the world by storm; I thank God every day, he is everything like my son, and nothing like you.”

Yuri snuck back up the stairs quietly, and cried, and cried, and cried himself to sleep. It would be the last time he would cry over her, he promised himself that much.

 

Yuri is sixteen, and it had been a hard year.

He’d grown more than he thought it was possible for any one person to grow within such a short amount of time. His bones aches and that grace and poise that had made him so special had abandoned him, leaving him like every other awkward teenager in the world. But even at his worst, he is still Yuri Plisetsky, and he is still a force of nature.

And he’s going to make the Olympic team next year if his life depends on it. He still can, and he will, and people are starting to realise that this isn’t the crumbling of his career so much as a bad patch he will inevitably stumble through.

He’s so rarely anxious before competitions that it seems a little absurd to be at all. The open practice was going fine, and if his nervousness made him snippier than usual with the other skaters—all of which he felt like he saw every other week—then no one said anything. His quad flip was once again within the realm of possibility, and no longer flirting too heavily with the risk of full body bruising and a mouthful of ice.

Everything is _fine._ Giacometti is a few feet away doing…whatever the hell it is he does, Katsudon was going over his step sequences again humming to himself, Viktor was being the world’s most _useless_ coach, leaning against the wall of the rink sighing dreamily at his husband—Mila was sitting on the bleachers looking amused more than anything.

And that’s when the illusion of calm shattered.

“Yuri?”

The voice sounds almost foreign, and he whips around to see who the hell was talking at him when he was trying to practice—unless it was Yakov or Lilia, he didn’t want to hear it, and even then, he rarely wanted to hear from them either.

But there she was, walking towards the edge of the ice, with her hair still short ( _good_ ), wrapped in a black coat. When he meets her eyes, she opens her mouth to speak, but Yuri’s heart is already beating loudly in his ears and he _bolts._ He’s at the far side of the rink before anyone can say a word, vaulting the wall and vanishing into the locker room without his skate guards (Yakov was going to kill him if he fucked up the blades but he just _didn’t care_ ).

He hears Viktor yelling, (“Georgi, go find Yakov, Mila, follow Yuri, and _you--,”_ he forgot sometimes, how ferocious Vitya could be when that moronic persona of his dropped) and finds himself collapsing on the bench in the locker room and he _can’t fucking breathe._

She shouldn’t be here, he’d made that much clear every time he had seen her; she did not fit in his life and she did not get to be there when she wanted to be, when it was convenient or full of glory to have a son like him, she didn’t get to be here now when he was going to _win_ and go to the _Olympics_ when she wasn’t there when he _lost,_ when he fucked up a goddamn Salchow and went hurtling into the side of the rink, living the next fortnight as a walking bruise.

She didn’t get to be here for this, she didn’t have the right to just turn up and and and—

 _God,_ why couldn’t he breathe?

His heartbeat still thrumming in his ears, the world felt out of focus and far away and the heaving in his chest _hurts,_ and he’s good with pain, he’s always good with pain, he can’t remember the last time some part of him didn’t ache, can’t remember his feet ever _not_ looking like they’d been brutalised.

But it hurts, it hurts in a way that is foreign and unwelcome (just like her) and he doesn’t know what to do with it or how to cope, and later he’ll remember to be horrified that the strange, ungodly sound was _him_ trying to breathe. But right now, he feels so far away from his body—strange, so strange, he had always been so _in command_ of it, even when it became gangly and awkward and rebelled against his every attempt to be graceful, it had been _his,_ and every ache and pain had been grounding and had been _owned._

And he reminded himself over and over; _she doesn’t get to love me only when it’s convenient, that’s what she has the other one for._

 

Yuri is nineteen and there’s a stranger in his kitchen.

It is not Nikita. For once.

That much is comforting to him. But there is a ten (eleven?) year old girl sitting at the table in his Dedushka’s kitchen, and Yuri is left once more with the panic that came whenever Nikita decided to turn up. The feeling that he is being ambushed or betrayed.

She has hair nothing like his, but her emerald green eyes light up when he enters the room. Dedushka had said nothing about guests, and immediately he knows why.

He never asked for her name. He knew, of course, that she existed. It felt like he had always known and it had existed in some compartment of his mind that was external to his life. Nikita had another child, with some husband who, as far as Yuri can tell, knows nothing of his existence. Objectively speaking, he thinks this makes him no longer an only child. But he grew up alone, with just Dedushka for company, and the idea of a _sister_ is strange, it seems out of place in his life.

But there she is, drinking hot chocolate in a mug with cartoon cats on it Yuri had loved when he was young.

Dedushka cleared his throat. “Yurochka, this is Sofya, she’s--,”

“I know who she is.”

Yuri sits down opposite her, and she smiles at him. He almost feels bad for hating her all these years—of course he hadn’t hated _her_ specifically, but the idea of her. The nameless child from the photo in her purse. That he had hated. The idea that someone was a more worthwhile child to be a parent to than he had been. That he had been so _faulty_ somehow that she was more deserving of a mother than he was.

“I’m sorry for just turning up, but I really wanted to meet you. Mama told me about you a while ago, and I’ve been watching you skate.” Sofya said, her voice warm and familiar somehow.

“It’s…it’s okay. I’m glad you’re here.”

To his surprise, Yuri wasn’t lying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of the chapters have already been written and a new chapter will be posted every few days until they're all up! Chapter one is the only chapter about a non-canon character, but I felt it was important to establish the backstory there and feel Yuri's mother--whatever she ends up being like--will be significant to him as a character.


	2. Nikolai Plisetsky

He goes to live with Nikolai Plisetsky when he’s four, and he can’t remember the house ever feeling so cold before.

Yuri had spent most of his life so far in this house, and it has always been cosy, over-flowing with warmth and the knowledge that he is loved. He knows all the photos on the walls and the texture of the blanket thrown over the back of the couch that his grandmother crocheted many years ago, when she was alive and before Yuri was. Her face smiles down at him from the mantle above the roaring fireplace. She is more familiar and remembered more clearly than either of his parents.

But this time the house feels cold.

He sits at the kitchen table in the same chair he always does, a mug of half-drunk hot chocolate in front of him. Leaning against the legs of his chair is the backpack he usually takes to kindergarten—the one with the cartoon tiger on it—stuffed full of his clothes and toys.

This place had always been warmer than the apartment he had lived in with his parents—it was like his mother always wanted it to look like no one lived there. And it did. There were no photographs on the walls, only expensive artwork, none of his drawings on the fridge. No toys or shoes or throws left scattered around the house. Nothing that said to anyone who entered that someone really lived there.

“Is Mama coming back?” He sniffled, even though he already knew the answer. He didn’t want it to be true, so maybe it didn’t have to be.

Dedushka gives him a sad smile, and everything he feared was true is confirmed. She isn’t coming back. Not for him. Not now, and perhaps not ever. “It’ll just be you and I for a while, Yurochka. But we’ll manage, won’t we?”

A few weeks after he arrives, Yuri turns five, and Dedushka decides it’s time for him to be part of an ancient tradition of the Plisetsky family: making pirozhki.

“Why can’t you just make it for me?” He asks with a whine.

Dedushka laughs. “What will happen when you are big and strong and move away? Who will make pirozhki for you then? Hm? It is important for you to learn, and then one day when you have a family of your own, you will teach them and the tradition will continue.”

(And he does—it’s not the family he thinks Dedushka was picturing for him, but many years from now he will be in an apartment in Saint Petersburg, banishing the former living legend of figure skating from the kitchen as he attempts to instruct an anxious foreigner and a stoic one on how to make katsudon flavoured pirozhki while a fiery haired woman drinks and laughs at them. It’s not the family Dedushka might have pictured for him, but it is a good one.)

“Did you teach Papa?”

The question makes the man falter for a moment, just long enough for Yuri to notice—he was a deeply perceptive child, who somehow saw too much and yet understood almost nothing. Other people would remain a mystery to him for many years to come. “I did. I hoped one day he might teach you, but it seems he never got the chance.”

He never got the chance to do a lot of things.

“Come now, you have much to learn. Remember, this is important! I cannot send you out into the world knowing you cannot feed yourself. So, we do it like this…,”

The pirozhki he makes isn’t nearly as good as Dedushka’s, not the first time—and if anyone was to ask Yuri his whole life long, he would always say that his Dedushka made it better. He doesn’t understand why at the time, because he did everything _exactly_ how Dedushka did it—who insists that it must be made with _love._ That _love_ is what makes it truly delicious. Love is not his friend yet, love is not something he understands very well.

He gets better over time.

 

The year he turns six, Yuri receives two of the greatest gifts he’ll ever receive.

The first:

A tiny pair of ice skates, and the promise of attending skating lessons at a local rink in Moscow. He doesn’t know it then, but this will be his lifeline. This is how he puts himself back together. This is how he finds value in himself, and this is how he finds himself a haphazard family that will stick by him even when he doesn’t deserve it.

The rink is small, he realises when he’s older, but at the time it seemed immense. He wanted to skate over every single inch of the ice, leave a mark on all of it. On the ice, he moves like a baby deer, as anyone does when they don’t know what they’re doing on skates. But once he gets the hang of it, he learns what he thinks flying might be like (that is, until he’s older and he learns his first salchow).

The second:

A kitten rescued from a shelter seventeen blocks away from Dedushka’s house. She is so unbearably small, and mewling so softly, and she loves Yuri instantly almost as much as he loves her. He promises to love her and take care of her his whole life long, and he means it—he grows up and he still means it.

And with all the unfortunate confidence of your average six-year-old, he dubs this beloved companion _Puma Tiger Scorpion Plisetsky._ Or Potya, for short. She never seemed to mind the name half as much as everyone else did. She only really cared that she was well fed, and that she continued to be allowed to sleep on Yuri’s bed.

These gifts will mean more to him in the grand scheme of his life than he could possibly have imagined at the time. Those skates begin the path to a lifelong passion, an ambition—something that will consume him and be consumed by him and be left forever changed for the encounter. And Potya? She teaches him how to love someone else again; she is the first addition to Yuri’s concept of family in quite some time, and it will be even longer before he lets someone else in again. But he will learn from her, and she will be there in during the darkest moments of his life.

If only because at the time, he doesn’t give anyone else the chance to be. But he will learn.

 

Yuri is ten years old when Yakov tells him he’ll be entering a competition—in Finland.

Everyone tells him not to be nervous, not to worry—and he isn’t nervous in the slightest. He’s come to be very aware of the fact that he’s a _damn good_ skater. Mila says not to get a big head, and Yakov says not to get ahead of himself. But it’s very uncommon for someone as young as him to be going anywhere for a competition other than a brief bus ride, and the reason he’s going hasn’t been said, but is very clear.

No one in his division in Saint Petersburg is competition anymore.

He isn’t worried about the competition at all. Really, the only thing weighing him down is the thought that Dedushka won’t be able to see him skate—he hadn’t missed a competition or an exhibition yet. But the doctor says Dedushka shouldn’t fly, his back isn’t what it used to be, and his health is exactly what one expects of a man of his age, who has worked too hard for too long.

Dedushka smiles and tells him how proud he is when Yakov comes to take him to the airport. Yuri doesn’t cry—he swears. And if he does, no one is cruel enough to point it out to him.

He’s never been on a plane before—he’s never been away from Dedushka and Potya for this long before. The idea makes him nervous, more nervous than the competition does. The competition doesn’t worry him at all.

(when he’s a lot older, Yuri will be grateful as to just how much Yakov goes out of his comfort zone to keep him calm during that trip)

Finland is cold, but not as cold as Saint Petersburg. He wanders around in just a thin sweatshirt and mourns the fact that it’s not cold enough to show off the tiger stripe jacket he got for Christmas.

He’s too focused for the rest of his competitors—he could skate circles around them; he can already pick the ones that aren’t going to make it to their senior debut. The ones that are going to quit and the ones that are in this until they’re out.

Yuri already knows he’s in this for life.

The practice session goes well, and he knows he’s going to win before anyone has even skated. Yakov still corrects him on about a dozen different things, on techniques that no one else is even doing yet. Mostly, he thinks Yakov would be bored if he didn’t find something to critique him on.

His costume isn’t the most comfortable—but there’s another boy there who is covered head to toe in the most obnoxiously bright feathers Yuri has ever seen, and nothing he will ever wear in a skate will be that awful. Nothing. Yakov is keeping up the pretence of this being a competition Yuri could lose, and Yuri just _wants_ to skate already so that everyone can see what he can do.

(he still wishes Dedushka could see him.)

He’s skated halfway to starting position when he notices—standing at the edge of the rink, a broad smile on his face. _Dedushka._

Yuri almost falls flat on his face, he glances at Dedushka’s smiling face, then at Yakov’s frowning one—and he wonders if he knew about this. The doctors said he shouldn’t fly—Yuri had been sitting in the doctor’s office when Dedushka had been told exactly that. His back wasn’t good, and his heart was just this side of not good enough to safely be flying around whenever his grandson happened to have a skating competition. Which would only get more frequent as he got older.

Dedushka had put up quite the argument with the doctor about how that was ridiculous, and for a moment there, Yuri thought he might make headway. But the doctor deemed it irresponsible with his health, and Dedushka had called Yakov to make the arrangements for him to go with his coach anyway.

But there he was anyway.

Yuri skates better than he ever has—lands everything Yakov warned him about in the practice skate—gets the new personal best he knew he would get and gets to see the proud look on his Dedushka’s face when he climbs to the top of that podium.

Life is good.

 

Yuri is nineteen and thinks he’s going to win the Cup of China for the second time.

Of course, he’s trying not to be over-confident (to a degree). Otabek performed excellently, and Chulanont got so many points for presentation and general showmanship, it’s almost obscene. But he’s still reasonably confident of his gold—but even if he doesn’t win (unlikely), nothing short of the sky falling is going to prevent him from being on that podium.

So naturally, the sky falls.

He finished his free program almost an hour ago and is half asleep slumped on the stands in his team jacket—he’d considered going back to his room at the hotel and napping for a while, but there was some upstart new kid who’d just joined the senior division that supposedly was worth watching. At least that was what Beka had told him earlier.

Yakov approaches with a grim look on his face and Yuri hates the way his heart clenches in fear. Somethings happened. Something bad. Though Yakov is always severe—he’s probably just overreacting. It could be nothing.

“Yurochka…it’s your grandfather.”

His blood runs cold and he almost misses the rest of the sentence.

“He’s had a stroke—they’ve taken him to the hospital in Moscow. The doctor says his condition is stable, but--,”

He doesn’t hear anything else he says, and he knows he says plenty. The world is far away and out of focus, silent except for the ringing in his ears and the thought that sickens him to his stomach: that Dedushka could be dying and he was in fucking _China_ of all places. He’s already calculating it in his head—the flight from there to Moscow is over eight hours on a good day, not counting travel time from the airports, and god what if there aren’t any tickets back?

“We need to go. Right now.” He finally says, snapping back into reality with a laser like focus. “Have you already booked a flight? Where’s Lilia? I’m assuming you’re staying here with Mila.”

Yakov clenches his jaw and there’s a look on his face that for once, Yuri can’t decipher. “Lilia is booking you the next flight back to Moscow. Are you sure you want to miss the--,”

“I don’t _need_ another medal, I _need_ to be back in Moscow.” He doesn’t know when he started yelling or how many people are now looking at them with the ravenous, hungry eyes people always look at his life with. As if they had nothing better to do than put his entire existence under a microscope and report back to whatever goddamn blog they were running that _The Russian Fairy Was Having Yet Another Meltdown!_ As if they weren’t the goddamn cause.

He's already tearing off back towards the hotel—he doesn’t really remember the way but his body is on autopilot and everything else fades. He can’t remember how his skate went, or what time Mila’s skate was meant to begin tomorrow—he’d been planning on watching it; she was getting so much better and inside, deep down, he was proud. And Beka, he’d made dinner plans with Beka tonight—

But all of it fades to white noise as he throws everything he can find into his suitcase without a second thought (later he’ll realise he left one shoe, a pair of jeans and his good headphones in the hotel room) and goes to find Lilia for his ticket.

The flight is long. He’s been on longer before—he knows this, objectively—but this is the longest flight of his life, and he is terrified every minute of it. Terrified that he’s going to get there and it’s going to be too late—maybe if he’d been at home or in Saint Petersburg, he would have made it in time to say goodbye to Dedushka—

The rational person in him, buried deep down, knows that Dedushka might be fine. He wasn’t weak by any means—Nikolai Plisetsky was tough, strong, stubborn. He sees with utter clarity where he got every inch of his reckless determination, his stubbornness.

And deeper, deeper down, Yuri refuses to admit to himself than he is _not ready_ to be without him yet.

He goes straight to the hospital from the airport—he’d already contacted the insurance company on the taxi ride there and made sure it was arranged, that Dedushka would get the best care money could buy even if it took every cent Yuri had.

The nurse outside his room smiles kindly—and he tries not to feel too patronized even if she is blocking the door.

“You must be Yuri, your grandfather’s been telling us all about you—please, come in.”

And there Dedushka is pale—paler than his usual complexion—but sitting up in his bed, a crossword puzzle in hand and he smiles when he sees Yuri. Yuri starts crying on the spot, practically throws his suitcase into a corner and dives at him for a hug.

“Yurochka, I thought you were busy competing.” He rumbles quietly.

“I got on the first flight when Yakov told me—are you…”

“I’m quite alright, little one. It was a _very_ minor stroke. They just brought me here as a precaution.” He says. “How did your competition go?”

Yuri is utterly baffled at how _calm_ he is, after he’d been busy trying not to have a panic attack in a plane bathroom. “I…I don’t know. I left before the medal ceremony. I should…I’ll call Beka and ask later...”

“I’m sure you did very well my boy. You always do.”

He stands there in silence for a moment, clinging to his grandfather’s hand and searching him for any sign that something was wrong, irreversibly wrong.

“What…what happens now? How long are you staying in the hospital? Do you need to attend rehabilitation or go into a hospice? Do you need a carer? I can take a year off, Dedushka, if you need me, I can stay here in Moscow. I’ll get Lilia to send Potya over and we’ll go home and I can--,”

“ _Yurochka.”_ Nikolai commands, his tone leaving no room for error or for interruption. “You will do no such thing. You will not jeopardise your career over a _minor_ health problem. It will be alright—the doctors, they will tell us what we need to do next and we’ll listen this time.” He pauses. “I will _try_ to listen this time. It will be okay, little tiger, the world is not ending. The sky has not fallen.”

Yuri believes him.

 

Yuri is twenty-two and recently received his second Olympic gold.

He’s riding a high of sponsorship opportunities and Olympic glory—finding that attending the games is so much more fun when he’s actually old enough to do _anything_ fun. Unlike the first time. Dedushka called the night he won gold, and Yuri cried into the phone like a child because more than anything, hearing that he’d made his Dedushka proud was _everything._

It’s been two months since that call and he’s unstoppable. Even Yakov is beginning to run low on things to criticise him for—but still, he always finds something to make Yuri work harder on. Yuri’s glad—he needs the push. He always needs the push.

Nothing could take him down now. Nothing and no one.

And he believes that right up until the moment he doesn’t.

He’s woken by a phone call from a woman he’s never met nor spoken to. At first, he’s angry at being woken up—today is his only day off and it’s _six in the morning_ and goddamn it he wanted to sleep in. But everything melts away when the woman speaks.

“Is this Yuri Plisetsky?”

“Yes, who’s calling?”

“I’m calling from the Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow, Mr. Plisetsky, your grandfather was just admitted with severe chest pain, and you’re listed as his next of kin.”

No. _No._ Not again.

“Is he alright? I’m on my way, is he okay?” He’s already scrambling through his apartment in the dark looking for clothes, shoes, his wallet—he needs to book a flight _right now._

“I…you should hurry. And contact any other family that might want to say goodbye.”

The flight takes an hour and a half, and he leaves half the things he needs in his apartment in the hurry. He’s never known fear like this, and it paralyses him. He doesn’t know what to do or who to call—because he should call _someone._

But it’s just Dedushka and him. It’s always just been Dedushka and him. He doesn’t know who to call to say their goodbyes— _goodbyes_ —and he doesn’t know who to call about everything that might come next and he is so fucking scared he forgets how to breathe.

He locks himself in the bathroom for half of the flight, has his second panic attack that day (the first had been in the Uber to the airport, much to the horror and concern of the driver) and ignores the stewardesses banging on the door trying to get him to leave.

He is too late.

Everything in him is as cold as the ice on which he spends his life, and the bed is empty and Dedushka is _gone._

He remains frozen in place in the doorway of the room Dedushka had been in until a nurse ushers him to sit in a waiting area. They need to change the sheets—another patient will be brought in soon. One who still has a chance.

Yuri isn’t sure how long he spends sitting there, staring at a spot on the linoleum floor willing himself not to be sick before his phone starts buzzing in his pocket.

(he’d made plans to have lunch with Viktor and Yuuri, at that nice restaurant that does the gnocchi Yuri likes, and both of them were going to pretend they didn’t notice he didn’t order a salad and wouldn’t tell Yakov and Lilia and it was going to be a _nice day_ )

“ _Yura? Where are you? Why aren’t you answering the door? Did you forget about lunch?”_

“I…” Is exactly how far he gets before he starts sobbing so hard he thinks he’s going to _choke_ on it. And god, for a moment he hopes he does. He hopes because he cannot live with this crushing, consuming loss, and the knowledge that he must go through the rest of his goddamn life and Dedushka won’t be there to see it.

“ _Yura? What’s going on? Talk to me, you’re scaring me. Do you need help? You’re not at home, where are you? We’ll come get you, right now.”_

“I’m…I’m in Moscow.” He chokes out, and he sees out of the corner of his eyes—blurred, so _blurred_ —one of the nurses he’d seen before giving him a look of pity.

“ _Moscow? What—Yuri, is it your grandfather? Is he okay?”_

It takes him a moment, because he doesn’t want to admit it out loud because then it’s true, it’s real and he can’t take it back or pretend it was a bad dream. It’s childish but he _can’t_ handle this. He doesn’t want it to be true. He can’t handle it being true. “No. He’s not.”

 

Yuri is twenty-two and he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about planning a funeral.

Once Yuuri knows, everyone knows. He’s still in that goddamn hospital waiting room when the cavalry arrives. For once Viktor is quiet, and Mila doesn’t know what to say. They hug him, and his arms stay limp at his sides. Yakov is already taking care of it, they say. Don’t worry, they’ve got him.

He doesn’t feel like anyone’s got him. He feels like he’s in a free fall and the ground is getting ever closer and he’s going to break every bone in his body and bleed out when he finally hits it.

Everything passes as a blur. He nods, and signs forms and tries to listen but can’t, he can’t, it’s like he’s underwater and everyone is trying to talk to him and nothing will stick, nothing makes _sense._ Lilia and Yuuri go almost everywhere with him; they listen when he can’t, and only bother him when he needs to sign another set of papers to confirm, without a doubt, that Nikolai Plisetsky is indeed dead.

He doesn’t remember much of the funeral, but what he does remember is this;

  * So many people he’d never met before, all crying and grieving.
  * The knowledge that his Dedushka was well loved.
  * Dozens upon dozens of people offering him their condolences for his loss, as if that’s going to help a goddamn thing.
  * The recurring, nauseating thought that his Dedushka died alone in that hospital bed without Yuri by his side.
  * Being surrounded by a different kind of family.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up is Yakov!


	3. Yakov Feltsman

Yuri Plisetsky is eight when he decides he’s going to be a professional skater even if absolutely no one is going to listen to him.

No one, at the moment, includes Yakov Feltsman—who is going to be his coach. It doesn’t matter what he has to do to convince him. Yuri is going to be the very best skater in Russia, and if he’s going to be that, he’ll need the man who coached Viktor Nikiforov to greatness on his team.

Dedushka had been almost too good about this. He had listened attentively as Yuri sat him down for a very serious talk a few months ago, after he’d been taken to the Rostelecom Cup, that he’d decided he was going to be a skater and there was no stopping him, so he shouldn’t even try. Yuri hadn’t thought he was _that_ convincing, but Dedushka didn’t try to stop him. Not a single word about how other things were more important or more ‘normal’ careers. Nothing about how it was a competitive sport and not a lot of people performed well enough at it to do it as a full-time job.

Just a nod, and a polite inquiry about what he planned on doing about it.

That was when Yuri had told him all about Yakov Feltsman—a skating coach in Saint Petersburg who trained champions. How he was going to convince him to be his coach, and that was how he’d do it. The help of the best coach in Russia, and that patented Plisetsky determination.

And so, over the course of quite some time, they had arranged to go to Saint Petersburg for a week. Yuri had made an appointment to talk to Mr. Feltsman, accompanied by Dedushka, and the woman on the phone had thought he was utterly adorable. He told her that he wasn’t adorable, he was ferocious, and she had obliged, even if she was trying not to laugh.

The rink was big. It was so much bigger than the one in Moscow where he’d taken all his skating lessons up until this point. That thought was as terrifying as it was exciting. He could see someone out on the ice—someone who looked familiar enough; had he skated at the Rostelecom Cup a few months ago?

Dedushka had politely asked the woman at reception where Mr. Feltsman’s office was, and Yuri had started marching off the second he’d been provided with a direction. When he knocked on the door with Coach Feltsman’s name on it, off to the side of the rink, a gruff voice from within told him to enter.

Immediately, Yuri knew that he had not been what Yakov Feltsman was expecting when he’d been told he had an appointment with a prospective student. He had known going in there that Feltsman didn’t _really_ take on novice skaters. But that didn’t matter. Yuri would convince him if it was the last thing he did. He needed to be the best, and the best skaters were trained by the best coaches.

The man frowned for a moment—though Yuri would later learn this was the closest thing he had to a neutral expression, and that Yakov just seemed perpetually displeased with the world around him. His eyes glancing between himself and Dedushka, the former of which had a determined scowl set firmly in place while the latter was smiling politely.

“I am to assume that you,” he nodded at Yuri, “are the Yuri Plisetsky I have a meeting with. Please. Sit.”

So he did.

“What can I do for you? I think there’s been a mistake—”

“There’s been no mistake.” Yuri replied. “I wanna be a skater—I wanna be _the best_ skater. And you’re _the best_ coach. Which means you have to be _my_ coach.”

Yuri had run through a million and one things he was going to say which were all going to convince this man that he was worth his time. That he had the potential to be the kind of skater Yakov Feltsman trained. Most of them had been stern but polite, on the advice of his Dedushka. Who believed that being polite, but firm was the best way to proceed no matter what one was trying to achieve.

All of this had gone out the window immediately. Yuri just _wanted_ this too badly to be level headed about it.

(many years later, he will still have this problem—wanting something so badly he becomes physically incapable of thinking about it rationally, sometimes it’s one of his better traits, and sometimes…well.)

“As I said, I think there’s been a mistake. Unless I’m sorely mistaken—I don’t usually train novice skaters.” Mr. Feltsman explained, using that voice that grown ups used to talk to kids that Yuri hated with a fiery passion. He was _young_ but he could understand what was being said, and didn’t need to be spoken down to. Not metaphorically anyway.

“I know you don’t. But you’re going to train me.”

“ _Yurochka.”_ Dedushka said quietly, in that warning tone that meant Yuri was probably out of line and should rein it in. Which normally he did.

But this wasn’t him snapping at a teacher or a classmate or not being as nice as he could be to the lady at the corner store. This was his whole future right in front of him and he could see it with a clarity he’d never seen anything before. If only he could get Mr. Feltsman to agree to coach him.

He grimaced—later Yuri would know this was as close to actually smiling as Yakov got most of the time. “No, no, it’s quite alright, Mr. Plisetsky. I’ll hear him out. Why am I going to coach you?”

“Because you coach Russian champions, and that’s what I’m gonna be. I’m gonna be better than Viktor Nikiforov someday—and if you don’t wanna coach me now, then you’ll just have to sit there and watch some day when I beat all your skaters. Trust me, you _want_ to be my coach.”

He laughed.

Yuri’s frown deepened.

“You’re a confident little thing, aren’t you?” He replied. “Tell you what. Why don’t we head down to the rink? You can show me how you skate.”

“And if I do well?”

“Then we’ll continue this conversation.”

“Deal.”

By the time Yuri debuts in senior competition, he doesn’t remember much of that skate. After all, how good could any eight-year-old be at skating? But clearly it went well, clearly he was _right_ and Yakov saw that he was going to be everything he said he was.

Yakov Feltsman coached Yuri to every ounce of greatness the boy had said he could achieve and kept coaching him until his late retirement.

Yuri tries not to wonder what might have become of him if someone else had been his coach.

 

Yuri Plisetsky is thirteen years old and he is already bored with the competition.

Juniors was meant to be a step up from novices, and for all of five minutes, it had been. But Yuri’s routines were—technically—perfect. He was skating well beyond the level of competition he was aged blocked into competing in.

Watching Viktor is where he gets the idea from.

Quads aren’t _that_ common in competition yet—Yuri remembers being seven and going to the Rostelecom Cup to watch Viktor and Georgi skate, before he’d ever had to share ice with either of them. He remembers that back then, people still _marvelled_ at the fact that Viktor Nikiforov could perform a quad loop. Like he had successfully gotten himself to the moon or something. But they were becoming more and more common. If you couldn’t land at the least one quad in a program in seniors, then you were behind the curve.

Viktor just made it look so _easy._

Yuri knew that was the next step—but no one did quads in Juniors. No one. Hell, some of the younger competitors (Yuri himself excluded) still struggled to land triple jumps and simple combinations. It simply wasn’t done.

He knew there were other reasons why quads weren’t a part of junior competition, he just found that he didn’t really care. Because he’s Yuri Plisetsky and he has already outgrown this competition and everyone in it and he needs to try something new before he loses his mind from boredom.

(this has always been a problem of his; when he gets bored he gets reckless, does things he shouldn’t do, and it’s almost impossible to rein him in now that Dedushka is in Moscow and he isn’t)

He had tried it a few times in practice when no one was looking, when Yakov was working with Viktor or Mila or Georgi, and no one was really looking his way. He’d almost gotten it then. He didn’t see why he couldn’t land it now.

So he switches out his triple salchow for a quad mid-skate and goes for it. For a moment there, he really feels like he’s flying—it’s the same feeling he gets when he goes for a triple except a _thousand_ times better. He can’t believe how good it feels. No wonder everyone was always trying for these. No wonder Viktor kept pushing for more and more quads be added to each program he did.

And then he hits the ice. Hard.

When he looks back at the video of this skate, he’ll realise that he didn’t know how to get the height he needed to make the turns and land properly. But he came close—dangerously close. Far too close for someone so young.

He still gets points for it though. He’s still going to win. Even if his shoulder is going to be black and blue by the time he gets to the locker room to change out of his costume.

Yakov is, predictably, furious with him.

“What were you thinking?” He hisses like a viper.

“I’m _bored._ These routines are too simple! None of this is a challenge anymore! I want to win, but it doesn’t mean anything if I don’t even have to work for it!” Yuri shouts back at him. He’d made it all the way to the locker room before Yakov had caught up with him.

“You have _no idea_ what you’re doing. You have no idea the amount of damage it could do to you to be landing those kinds of jumps! You’re too young for it, Yurochka!”

“I’m not _too young_ for anything, you’re full of shit! I could have done it—I almost did. I got almost full points for that!”

“I don’t care! Do you know what will happen to you? To your bones? Your joints? The shock impact is too much, you might land that jump now but you won’t have a career by the time you make it to seniors! And then what was all of this for? Hm? Why have I trained you all these years? Why have you worked hard all these years? To be some has been skater who lasted a year into his senior debut and then had to vanish because he’d worked himself into retirement before he could drive?” Yuri was silenced. He hated it. But he was.

“Do you know how many skaters I have trained who pushed themselves too far, too young? The ones who retired before they made their debut? The ones who injured themselves so badly they’re going to live the rest of their lives in pain? And for what? They’ll never set foot on the ice again. And _no one_ will remember them for how great they _could_ have been. No one ever remembers anyone for what they _could_ have been. Only what they were. And _you_ will not be a _could have been._ Not on my watch.”

A year and a half later, when he attempts _one more quad,_ out of sheer spite and irritation at the world and everyone in it, he tries not to think about Yakov. About what he’d said. About the skaters who had maybe been there that first year or two he had been, and then had never been seen again.

He doesn’t want to be like them.

Yuri considers apologising to Yakov for it, the second time, but somehow can’t bring himself to try. He works himself harder, but safely, and doesn’t argue for a whole week. He thinks Yakov gets the message. He hopes he does.

 

Yuri almost makes it to seventeen before he realises that despite his earlier, naïve thoughts, he is not exempt from this sort of bullshit.

It sounds stupid when he says it out loud, but somehow, he thought that by getting this far without any major growth spurts, he was going to be spared the pain of the awkward gangly teenage years. His whole image, his whole career, was built on the fact that he was small, lithe, graceful.

Now he’s none of those things, and it’s _terrifying._

Not for the first time, when he hits the ice with a sickening _thud_ he thinks his career might be over, past glory be damned. It’s not unheard of after all. Everyone knows what they say about young Russian skaters. They peak before puberty can get its hands on them, and then suddenly vanish from competing when their balance is shot to hell by the first major growth spurt.

He thought he was above all of that. After all he was Yuri fucking Plisetsky. He had made the youngest senior debut in ISU history. He was the youngest Grand Prix gold medallist ever. He had _destroyed_ Viktor Nikiforov’s world record in his first year competing in the senior bracket. He was the hopes and dreams of the 2018 Olympic Russian Skating Team.

But none of that matters because for the _seventh_ time that day, he’s flubbed a jump he’s been able to land successfully for years and hit the ice with such force, his bones rattled.

“Maybe you should give him a break—go a little easier on him.” He’s not sure who says it—his ears are ringing still from the latest fall on the ice, but the very idea of it enrages him.

He clambers to his feet, feeling as graceful as a baby deer and looks at Yakov—there’s a small crowd who has gathered to watch their soon to be _former_ prodigy go down in flames. But Yakov looks as calculating and displeased as he ever did. There’s not a hint of the condescension he’s grown accustom to over the past month or two from _absolutely everyone._ Of course, some of it was well meaning—most of it probably was.

But that doesn’t make it any fucking better. He doesn’t _want_ to have everyone go easy on him. He doesn’t _want_ to be spoken down to. He’s a fucking world champion, he’s the best of the best at what he does—age be damned.

He will _not_ be treated like a child, not here. Not on the ice. Not the one place he has earned some kind of respect.

He waits, for a moment. He waits, and he expects Yakov to tell him to go home, that he’s done for the day. He waits, ready to argue for his right to stay on the ice because goddamn it, he is above this and he will _not_ be driven away.

“Work on your step sequence—if it’s not perfect by the time I come back, you’ll stay here all night for all I care. Then tomorrow we resume jumps.” And just like that, he turned and stalked to the other end of the rink to check on Mila.

Yuri had never been so glad to be threatened.

 

He is twenty-two and the sky has fallen, shattered upon impact, and now he stumbles over the pieces left on the ground.

By the time Yuri has re-emerged from what he can only describe as a _catatonic state,_ most of the funeral arrangements have already been made. Awaiting his signature. He’s presented with a large stack of documents that he needs to sign, and payments that need to be made.

Yuuri smiles sadly at him when he looks confusedly at the papers. “Yakov’s been up all night making calls. There weren’t any…instructions in the will. So, we just…did what we thought was best. But you’re the next of kin, so you need to sign off on everything.”

Despite rather recently thinking himself so grown up, staring down at those papers he realises he wouldn’t have known that he needed to do half the things Yakov has done while he was sitting there being useless.

He signs all of them without reading most of them. It feels strange and yet familiar to trust someone so wholly with something so important. But he doesn’t think, right now, he has an option.

Yuri sits at the wake, nursing his fourth (fifth?) drink of the afternoon and wills away anyone else who might want to express their condolences for his loss. He just _can’t_ listen to it again. Yakov, as stiff as ever, sinks into the chair beside him.

“I should tell you to stop drinking, but given the occasion, I won’t.”

Yuri sneers. “Appreciate it.”

“As you should.”

And it was stupid, he knew it was, the fact that Yakov wasn’t treating him like he was going to shatter was so bizarrely comforting. They were all trying to help—he knew that, they might not be succeeding but he knew that they all meant well. But the more they treated him like he was going to fall to pieces at any moment, the more he began to think they were right. That he wouldn’t be able to hold it together. And they all kept asking what Yuri _needed,_ as if he had any idea what he _needed_ to make this better. Nothing was ever going to make this better.

Yakov hadn’t asked. He never asked. He observed and he issued instructions, and he acted of his own accord. He’d said once that most people had no goddamn idea what they needed; people weren’t that smart or that self-aware. They hated looking at their own problems. That’s why they outsourced it—that’s why he had been so successful as a coach. Because skaters couldn’t damn well see what they were doing wrong.

Yakov didn’t ask. He dealt with the paperwork and made all the phone calls Yuri hadn’t been capable of making. He’d let Yuri drink even though there had never been a single instance in his life in which he hadn’t promptly regretted ever drinking a goddamn thing come sunrise.

Not for the first time, Yuri wonders if maybe he doesn’t appreciate Yakov enough. But there’s something strange and too _emotional_ about confronting the idea that Andrei Plisetsky’s face had long since faded from Yuri’s memory, and he no longer came to mind when Yuri thought of his _father._ Instead, it had been a role mediated between Dedushka and the man beside him.

No, he doesn’t want to confront that. Doesn’t want to have to ever say it out loud. He hopes Yakov knows.

 

“I’m retiring.” Yakov tells a twenty-five-year-old Yuri, and somehow despite knowing damn well this was coming, he didn’t see this coming.

“You’re _what?”_ Yuri shrieks shrilly. So much for this being a quiet conversation between the two of them. The entire rink turned to stare for a moment before deciding it really wasn’t worth the trouble and going back to what they were doing. Good. Despite the yelling—a default reaction, on some level Yuri wasn’t even sure he could control it—this wasn’t something he wanted to include the whole world in, or even the whole rink.

“You heard me. I am retiring, Yurochka. It’s time. I’ve had a long career, I’ve coached champions, and now it is time.” Yakov sounds certain of this in a way that frightens Yuri to his core—because despite some minor incidents of success over the years, when Yakov Feltsman was certain of something, there was no changing his mind.

“Well what the hell am I supposed to do? Huh? Where the hell am I going to find a decent coach at such late notice? Where the hell am I going to find a decent coach _period?_ ” He knows he can’t stop Yakov from retiring forever—and even trying to hold him off until Yuri himself retires from skating competitively was asking a bit much, but maybe one more year. Give him one more good year.

“I’ve already found my replacement.”

“What? Who?” A pause, as it all starts to sink in a little more. “How long exactly have you known you were retiring?”

“For nearly four seasons now.”

“ _What?”_

“The timing was not right then. So, I waited. But now…now you will be alright.”

_Four seasons._

It hits Yuri with a sickening force that this was about him. Yakov had put off retiring for _his_ sake. He thinks back, thinks of the funeral, thinks of how much he couldn’t handle any more goddamn change back then or he would have shattered into a thousand tiny shards of glass, and cut up everyone who tried to help him back together.

Suddenly he doesn’t think he has any room to argue with him. But acceptance isn’t easy to swallow.

“Who’s the sorry bastard you got as your replacement? If you say Celestino, you’re not retiring, I don’t care how old and crochety you are.”

A heavy hand comes to rest on his shoulder and he thinks—he thinks—that might be the closest thing to an actual smile he’s ever seen on Yakov’s face. It reminds him of the first day. When he’d rushed in there guns blazing _demanding_ to be coached to greatness by him. Yakov had thought it was funny at the time. But. Well.

Who was laughing now?

“You and Vitya are going to do amazing things together, I am sure.”

Yuri kind of knew that one was coming—the whole world had been waiting on it.

“You’re joking. You saw what happened to his last skater. He fucking _married_ the guy, and then he _retired._ He’s too soft, he’s always been too soft—what are you trying to take me into retirement with you?” He spat out, but there was no anger in it. There was no anything in it. It was just a pretence now.

Yakov went quiet for a moment, the hand dropping from Yuri’s shoulder, and the older man’s eyes drifting from his face to the ice. “You can pretend to be the same angry child you always were, but I think we both know better now, da? Don’t worry, it will all work out in the end.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up is Viktor and I'm super excited about that, so yeah!


	4. Viktor Nikiforov

He is seven years old the first time he lays eyes on Viktor Nikiforov, and everything changes.

Going to the Rostelecom Cup had been his Dedushka’s idea; Yuri had loved his skating lessons on the weekends so much, and he’d improved so much, perhaps he would want to see some of the best skaters in Russia and beyond performing. He barely slept the night before, excitement buzzing through him endlessly.

That excitement is now palpable—he’s never seen skating like this. Ms. Ivanov, who took his skating class, is pretty good—better than any of the kids she taught. But that is nothing compared to a stadium full of people, all screaming the name of their favourite skater, all waiting to see if Russia’s best was going to land the three quads he supposedly had in his program this year.

All of them were beautiful, watching them move across like they were gliding alongside the now comforting sound of blades striking the ice. Yuri would look back on this day as when he fell in love with skating, rather than clinging to it like a lifeline.

(many years from now, exhausted, trapped in an airport in Spain, sustained only by the adrenaline of a gold medal, he’ll tell Viktor about that day, and pretend he doesn’t regret it afterwards)

And then there he is. At that moment, Yuri can’t imagine a world in which Viktor Nikiforov becomes such a constant, close figure in his life. He can’t imagine him as a real _person._ He seems larger than life on the ice; ethereal and other worldly and beyond the trifling of ordinary people like him—because back then, he was still just ordinary. He could have been anyone, there were thousands of people in the crowd and maybe he was _good_ at skating but in hindsight, the only thing he really had on his side was that he was obnoxiously determined. The kind of determination that led people either to glory or to ruin—and sometimes both.

Viktor lands all three of those quads, he skates with an ease that seems impossible. How could anyone find such technically complex movements to be so easy? Like he’d never had to try at all (that wasn’t true and Yuri knew it, he _watched_ it for years to follow). Like he had been born with the god given ability to skate as though he was more comfortable, more stable, more secure with ice beneath his feet than he ever would be with solid ground. Yuri wanted to skate like that—he wanted people to believe he was _just that good,_ wanted them to watch him and think him a creature of the ice, and not something as mundane as a human being on land.

And while he could not, at that moment, imagine his future with the complexity it would entail,

(after all, how could he imagine a decade from then, guarding the rings at his goddamn wedding having to keep him focused enough to get through the ceremony with fond exasperation), he knew something important.

He was going to beat Viktor Nikiforov. He was going to be _better_ than him.

 

Becoming Yakov’s student was not as simple as just getting him to agree. The logistics of doing so were far beyond Yuri’s comprehension. But the one thing that stood out clearly was this: Yakov Feltsman trained skaters at a rink in Saint Petersburg. Which meant Yuri needed to be in Saint Petersburg.

His Dedushka was painfully, painfully supportive. If his Yuri said he was going to be a skater, then he would do everything in his power to make sure that _could_ happen. Even if it meant leaving Moscow. For a while, he talked to neighbours about potentially selling the house, and Yuri regretted ever wanting to be a skater, ever putting on his first pair of skates.

The house doesn’t get sold and Yuri pretends he doesn’t cry in relief, clinging to the blanket his grandmother had made. They won’t sell the house, but they will rent an apartment in the heart of Saint Petersburg so that Yuri can begin training under Coach Feltsman.

Finally, about a month after Yuri first skates for Yakov—and seemingly proves that he has something worth nurturing in a skater—he arrives for his first training session after school at the rink. He practically sprints to the edge of the ice, and Viktor doesn’t look any more like a _person_ than he did that day at Rostelecom. He still floats across the ice, lands every jump and looks _effortless._

Yuri will grow up not being sure if effortless is a good thing—he doesn’t want anyone to know when he struggles, but shouldn’t people _know_ how hard you worked at something?

He’s still staring when Viktor skates over to the edge of the ice to greet him, that cheesy smile plastered on his face.

His whole demeanour shifts; he seems to be a completely different person by the time he reaches the rink barrier to face Yuri. Too cheerful, too exuberant. He isn’t at all what Yuri expected, having seen him skate (and watched countless videos after the fact online). It was almost jarring, even when he was being friendly. “So you’re Yakov’s new student!”

It was overwhelming, being so close to him.

And so Yuri did what he was best at, it would seem, next to skating. He spoke without thinking.

“I’m going to beat you! I’m gonna be a better skater than you some day, just you wait!” He declares it loudly and with the pride of someone who isn’t thinking about a single word that’s coming out of their mouth. The pride and assuredness of a child who didn’t know how much work it would take to back up those words.

(not that it mattered, because he was going to put in that work anyway and he _would_ make good on those promises)

He waits for Viktor to be angry, or to laugh in his face—he can hear two others, on the other side of the rink laughing—but he doesn’t. Instead, his face splits in that wide and someday infuriating grin. And it’s so genuine Yuri thinks about shoving him over.

“Good! I hope you do someday. Just maybe not today, yes?”

Yuri stared at him for a moment, utterly baffled with the conversation that was taking place. Everyone in the room seemed to be waiting for him to deflate and accept that Viktor was just _nice,_ and somehow, he had become the best by being _nice._ But instead, Yuri puffed up like a small bird faced with its reflection; angry, indignant and absolutely not having this.

There’s a single harsh nod before Yuri turns on his heel and stomps off to Yakov’s office.

 

Yuri is fifteen years old and he is going to _murder_ former world champion figure skater, Viktor Nikiforov.

He can’t remember the last time he was this angry; which is saying something because he is almost _always_ angry. He’s been told it’s not healthy, but he can’t bring himself to care when he’s on the cusp of greatness. And he _knows_ he’s going to be great.

All he’s ever had was determination and the Plisetsky stubborn streak to his name and he’s made it _work._

He sacrificed almost everything to get this far. He’s sacrificed time with his grandfather and going to school and making friends, he’s given up his right to attempt quads until _this year_ even though he could so easily have been doing them all through juniors. He’s given up countless hours of sleep and suffered blister after blister as his feet became calloused and _bled_ from the work, and the bruises every time he didn’t land a jump.

All because he wanted to be the best, he wanted to step onto the ice with Viktor goddamn Nikiforov—not the guy he’d come to know, sharing ice with him the past few years, but the skater he’d seen at Rostelecom when he realised skating was all he’d ever want to do—as his equal, he wanted to _beat_ him. He wanted to stand at the top of the podium and have everyone know that he was the best, that he worked for this and that he _deserved_ it. And he was going to do it with a program by Viktor, he was going to take the world by storm with it.

And Viktor had retired the second Yuri could truly share the ice with him, abandoned him and all his dreams, and forgotten (yet again) about a promise he’d made.

Everything is such a flurry of anger, he can say with certainty he doesn’t remember much of what happened between him realising what Viktor had done and him being on the plane to Japan.

But he’s sitting there, hood pulled over his face clutching his phone like a lifeline—even though it was turned off because god help him when Yakov realised he was gone. Worse, when Yakov told _Dedushka_ he was gone.

He just _needed_ to confront him face to face.

Because Viktor was Viktor and for whatever reason, despite being a bumbling moron most of the time, he had a silver tongue. And he slipped away from responsibilities and promises like a fucking snake. There was no way Yuri would get the answers he wanted if he tried calling from Russia—assuming Viktor would even answer the goddamn phone.

He just.

Felt like a child.

Objectively, he knows he _is_ a child. Viktor and Georgi and Yakov and even fucking Mila—who had only _just_ turned eighteen herself and had no goddamn room to talk—make sure he’s aware of that every day. Painfully aware of it. That he’s a child, little Yuri, _Yurochka._ He’s done nothing but prove himself over and over again, and he’s still just _little Yuri._

And even though Viktor had sworn black and blue, if he made it through Juniors and didn’t attempt another quad (even though he _knew_ he could land it), he would choreograph his Senior debut, Yuri was chasing him halfway across the world because he’d been abandoned in favour of fucking Katsuki.

He thinks, staring out the window at the clouds, that this might be his own fault for thinking he could rely on Viktor in the first place. That’s on him—he should have known better. But that doesn’t stop it from _stinging_ in the worst way possible. Like somehow if he was good enough as a skater, that would be it. This wouldn’t happen.

He lands at Saga Airport seething with rage and the steely determination that he was going to win gold in his debut with or without Viktor goddamn Nikiforov, and when he did, he was going to rub the old man’s nose in it.

He didn’t need Viktor’s help anyway.

 

Yuri Plisetsky is fifteen (almost sixteen!) years old, his first senior Grand Prix gold hangs around his neck and he’s about to doze off on Viktor’s shoulder in a cramped corner of the Barcelona airport.

If he hadn’t just won gold, he might have been a lot more pissed off about the fact that their flight had been delayed twice and then cancelled and they didn’t know when the next one was going to be, only that according to the woman at check in it would be soon enough that there was no point in them leaving to go stay in a hotel—or anywhere with a bed, really—in case they missed the new flight.

Mostly Yuri was just too damn tired to care.

Between all the training, and the competition and staying up all night to completely change his exhibition program, all Yuri wanted was to sleep for the next year. Or at least until Yakov started harping on about choreographing his next program.

His phone had just about died and was left charging in the socket in _another_ cramped corner of the airport. Yakov had wandered off in search of the bitterest coffee available (because apparently the man did not believe in sugar, or y’know _joy_ ), and Mila was napping on a bench nearby using her duffle-bag as a pillow.

And Viktor would not fucking sit still, Jesus Christ didn’t he know Yuri was trying to _sleep?_

“If you move one more time, I’m going to dig my skates out of my bag and stab you with them.” He muttered, eyes still closed, arms crossed in front of his chest.

“Aw, Yurio, you don’t mean that!”

How exactly could anyone sound so relentlessly cheerful given the situation?

He cracked an eye open, glaring up at the man. “I have never meant anything more in my damn life, old man.”

“No, you don’t. You’re in too good a mood.” Yuri squinted at him, _angrily._ “Don’t even try—you think after this many years I can’t tell when you’re _pretending_ to be in a bad mood? You’re like one of those cats that complains when you try and pet it, but still for some baffling reason wants to be petted.” He paused for a moment. “There’s a reason I’m a dog person.”

“Shut up.”

“That means I’m _right,_ doesn’t it? Admit it, I was absolutely right!”

The corner was quiet for a moment before Yuri whacked him squarely in the stomach and he yelped like he’d just been stabbed. Drama queen. The silence settled between them more easily this time; as it did occasionally. Very occasionally, in the last year or so. The older Yuri had gotten, the more competitive he had gotten, the harder it had been for the two of them to get along.

“I’m proud you know.”

“Of what?” Yuri mumbled, eyes closed again—voice coming out annoyed. He was never going to get a wink of sleep.

“Of you, Yurochka. I don’t say it much, do I? But I am. You told me that first day you were going to beat me—and I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t quite believe you then, but I believed you would a long time before I think anyone else figured it out.”

_Oh._

Yuri forgets how to breathe for a moment. Squeezes his eyes shut and contemplates pretending he dozed off _suspiciously quickly_ like he used to do when he wanted Dedushka to carry him to bed when they’d been watching movies downstairs.

The next words slip out before he can think better of them.

“I saw you. That year, at Rostelecom. I saw you skate. That was when I knew I wanted to be a skater. When I knew I wanted to beat you. Because you were the best.” He takes a breath and decides there’s no point stopping now. “You went out onto the ice and everyone in that stadium held their breath and I _wanted_ that.”

And he had gotten it, at the Grand Prix. People expected so much of him and he hadn’t let them down, and it had been everything he’d ever wanted.

Before Viktor can open his mouth, he continues. “This does _not_ mean I have some stupid hero-crush on you like Katsudon, alright? You were a good skater— _were,_ old man—but now I’ve crushed you record so that makes me a _better_ one.”

He peeks an eye open and sees that _stupid_ look on Viktor’s face—the one he’d had that first day they’d met, but it’s…calmer. More serene. _Sincere._ Like that look Viktor used to get when his heart was still in skating, when he was on the ice and it was impossible to think he’d ever been intended for anything but this.

“It does.” Yuri’s brain about short circuits. “But I’ve known for a while you were going to surpass me. Mind you, I thought it would take a little longer—but I’m glad. If anyone had to take that record from me, that it was you, Yura. And I’m sorry that I almost broke my promise—but for the record, I think you would have won even without my program.”

And if Yuri’s eyes sting ever so slightly with tears that are never being shed, he swears it’s from the exhaustion and nothing else. The exhaustion partially curbed by falling asleep leaning on Vitya’s shoulder for a few hours, before he flies home a champion for the first time.

 

Yuri is eighteen years old and he hates weddings.

Or specifically, he hates _this_ wedding—the Nikiforov-Katsuki wedding. All the skating blogs are toting it as the wedding of the decade, a true love story on the ice.

And all Yuri wants is to murder one of the grooms. Which, really, is not a new feeling, nor is it specific to anything to do with the wedding. After all, the overwhelming urge to kick Viktor in the shin went back almost a decade. He liked to think it only cropped up when Viktor really deserved it—which just so happened to be extremely often. How, exactly, did this man survive to adulthood?

Yuri will never know.

What he does know is that as per his role in the wedding party, he has a sacred duty to make sure that the rings aren’t lost between now and the ceremony and a personal duty to make sure Viktor doesn’t do anything stupid which might prevent him from marrying Katsudon.

The first task is easy as hell (even if he can hear Otabek in his head reminding him of every time he misplaced his goddamn headphones and subsequently _complaining_ about it via skype), the second one might take a small army and several shots of vodka—for Yuri, _not_ for Viktor, not before the ceremony anyway.

After the two morons successfully get married, they can do whatever they want.

But the ceremony doesn’t start for another forty-seven minutes and everything is already chaos. Yuri doesn’t know why he ever expected anything less from _Viktor’s_ wedding. For starters it’s full of skaters—flamboyant and over the top by nature—and secondly, there’s approximately nine thousand people running around and about twelve different language barriers that are not being overcome anytime soon.

So obviously the whole thing works out like this; the rings are still safely in a little velvet pouch in the pocket of the suit Yuri’s wearing, and Viktor is nowhere to be seen. No one else seems particularly worried about that yet, but not everyone has experienced firsthand just how much Viktor Nikiforov seems to ignore fundamental facts of the universe. Like the passage of time.

He thinks this should probably be Giacometti’s job, but Yuri can’t think of anything that could make his day _worse_ than having to talk to that guy.

He finds Viktor staring out at the ocean, already dressed and ready to go. And in the completely wrong place. Yuri isn’t surprised, he wishes he was though.

“You do know you’ve got somewhere to be right? Kind of a big deal? If you’re late, Katsudon is going to cry and I am not dealing with that.” He called out, hands stuffed in his pockets—one curling into a fist around the velvet pouch with the rings in it. Just to make sure it was still there. Because this was…

It was important. More important than he ever wanted to admit.

“Of course I won’t be late!” Viktor replied gleefully, glancing over his shoulder—grinning as always. Before his expression faltered immediately to one of _panic._ “Wait, what time is it? Am I already late? Yura, tell me I’m not _late—_ ”

“Jesus Christ, old man. No, you’re not late. Ceremony is in—” He glanced down at his watch, a gift from Viktor and Yuuri themselves last year for Christmas. “—thirty-two minutes. But you’re meant to be there early and be waiting for the pig at the altar. Y’know, as per the plan you made me listen to seven _thousand_ times since you started planning this stupid wedding.”

His face softens, and he turns back to the ocean again. Yuri thinks he might have to drag him. Because by god, this wedding will not crash and burn on his watch. He’ll be dealing with the ensuing chaos for the rest of his life, and Yuri doesn’t like either of them enough to put up with that.

But it seems he’ll put up with a lot.

“Do you remember the first time we came here?”

“You mean do I remember when you threw your career in the toilet, ran away to Japan to chase a drunkard when you were meant to be choreographing my program and when I had to come here to tell you that you were a moron? Yes. In vivid detail.”

“Who would have thought this is where we’d end up?”

“Anyone who had eyes or had to spend more than five minutes in your and Katsudon’s presence. Ever. You’re goddamn insufferable. And now you’re going to be insufferable _and_ married—the world awaits in dread.”

“One day you’ll be this happy and then you’ll understand.”

“God, I hope not. C’mon, don’t make me call in Lilia.”

With great difficulty and an abundance of sentimentality, Viktor did indeed arrive in time for the ceremony—much to Yuri’s surprise. Not because he doubted the moron wanted to marry Katsudon, but because time, personal space and the limits of physics supposedly did not apply to one Viktor Nikiforov—well, now Viktor Nikiforov-Katsuki.

To the surprise of no one, both the grooms cried their way through the wedding—Viktor more than Yuuri, Yuri delivered the rings successfully, and the vows went on for what felt like hours.

(when Yuri complained— _quietly_ —about how long they were taking, Otabek threatened to tell both Yuuri and Viktor that he had teared up at one point, and he kept his mouth shut for the rest of the ceremony—Beka and Mila thought it was _hilarious_ )

And now that he was older, he could see with absurd clarity how much Viktor had needed this, needed someone. How he seemed to have reclaimed a certain _brightness_ that had been missing for the year or two leading up to his retirement. The thought made this overwhelming _something_ bubble up in his chest with stupid, unadulterated joy for the old man.

And maybe he cried. _Maybe._ But god help him, he would die before he ever let Viktor know that.

 

Yuru Plisetsky is in the prime of his career, aged twenty-five, and Yakov fucking _bailed_ on him.  

He wasn’t really all that mad—he couldn’t be. Not when he knew full well, Yakov was originally planning on retiring after the Beijing Olympics. He never would have come back after that season, he doesn’t think, in fact Yuri is entirely sure he’d already made arrangements for a new coach for him. But then Nikolai had died, and…well.

So no, he couldn’t _really_ be angry at Yakov for retiring when he had, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be mad in general.

The whole world had been waiting for this to happen, after all, he thinks a lot of people were surprised it didn’t happen sooner—but Yuri hadn’t _wanted_ it to happen sooner. But it was happening. Yakov was retiring, and that meant only one thing.

Viktor would be stepping in as his coach.

It wasn’t that Yuri didn’t know Viktor was a good coach or choreographer—he was, he’d been helping Yuri choreograph for years—but he’d flourished under _Yakov’s_ brand of coaching; harsh, relentless, _ruthless._ And Viktor?

Well, Viktor had married the first skater he’d ever coached, and hadn’t coached a damn person since.

For the first time in a long time, arriving at the rink Yuri felt a strange sense of dread. Inside, Viktor sat on the stands, two take away cups of coffee sitting there—which on the one hand, he was glad for because getting up at five am never _really_ became pleasant, but equally so he knew Yakov would probably sooner banish him to Siberia than let him have coffee during the season—or even during season prep.

“Yura! Good, you’re here. Come, sit, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Somehow Yuri felt like he was sitting down to be told his dog died.

But he took the coffee—it was one of those obnoxiously sweet caramel filled drinks that Yuri was _never_ meant to have—and sat down, dropping his bag on the rink floor beside him.

“I know you probably have some concerns—,” Viktor began.

“Oh I have plenty of concerns.”

“—but not to worry! I’ve got all of this figured out.”

Yuri didn’t doubt that Viktor _thought_ he had all of this figured out. Because Viktor always thought he had everything figured out. It was practically a hallmark of his personality; alongside forgetting promises and overexuberance about absolutely everything. And Yuri is dreading every second of it.

Viktor’s eyes soften for a moment. “I know you don’t think this is going to work because Yakov and I have very…different methods.” _That_ was an understatement. “And you’re right. Yakov and I are nothing alike as coaches, and I will not pretend that I’m going to change to be like him because I won’t.”

That’s about what Yuri expected.

“But I don’t think I need to be like Yakov—Yakov made you great, he made me great as well. He taught you dedication, stubbornness, hard work. And it was ruthless and it made you a champion. But now you’re old enough to know people stagnate. Skaters stagnate all the time, the stakes get higher, expectations grow and competitors become more skilled _younger,_ and maybe, I think, you need something new to keep growing. Because there’s a fundamental difference between Yakov and I; Yakov was never a skater. Not like I was, and I know better than anyone that you have to keep growing and evolving to stay at the top. You don’t need Yakov to reinforce your work ethic anymore—you do that on your own. Getting you to take a day off is like pulling teeth sometimes. But what you do need is someone who can help you grow as a performer, someone who knows you and how hard you’ll work without my needing to hound you day in and day out about it.”

He paused for a moment, took a breath. “What I’m saying is that if I can put my trust in you—to be the skater I know you are—then you can put your trust in me to be the coach you need. Can you do that?”

A silence fell between them for a moment, and Yuri was…overwhelmed. It’s not like he had _no_ faith in Viktor as a coach—but he specialised in a very different type of skater to Yuri. Katsuki had been fantastic of his own accord, and too trapped in his head to realise it without a cheerleader of a coach to remind him of what he _could_ be.

Yuri had made himself _amazing_ and didn’t need anyone to tell him he was.

Though he never tired of being told it anyway.

But maybe…

“Yeah. I think I can manage that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter five is Mila and honestly Mila and Yuri? So underappreciated.


	5. Mila Babicheva

Yuri Plisetsky is eight years old and he doesn’t think he likes his new rinkmates very much.

But he himself hasn’t been very likable since he got there anyway. He tells himself this is because he’s there to become the best skater in Russia, not make friends. But really it has more to do with the fact that he’s never been very good with people. Apparently, this includes his new rinkmates—who he’s going to be stuck with for a long, long, _long_ time yet. The oldest of them is Georgi—and he’s not even close to retiring.

The other one (besides Viktor) is a girl a few years older than him named _Mila Babicheva,_ and she likes Yuri about as much as he likes her—not a lot.

( he’ll learn a lot later that this isn’t true for either of them and probably never was )

She skates over to the edge of the rink he’s leaning against because he _knew_ Coach Feltsman would be hard on him, but wow his everything hurts, and he’s not giving up just…taking a break. Unfortunately for him, so is Mila.

“Your little temper tantrum at Viktor yesterday was _adorable._ I’m sure he’s _so_ threatened.” And she smiles in that obnoxious way of hers. Like she’s _so much_ more mature than he is, and it makes Yuri want to snarl at her.

But he’d promised Dedushka he was going to be _nice._ He was going to get along with his rinkmates and he was not going to cause trouble after all the work he’d put in to be there, and after Coach Feltsman had taken such a risk taking on such a young student…

“You know you’re so young you probably won’t ever even skate in the same division as him, by the time you’re old enough he’ll be retired.”

…but he was going to break that promise. Right now.

“I bet you’d know since you’re practically ancient, _Baba._ ”

The corner of her eye twitches in a way that Yuri will come to fear, and everything that happens next happens _so fast,_ he barely knows what happened.

But when he does figure it out, he’s been thrown over one of Mila’s shoulders and she is skating towards the centre of the rink, and Yuri is _shrieking_ in displeasure. He kicks, he flails, he does everything in his power to get Mila to let go of him—even if it means being dropped _hard_ on the ice. He thinks the physical bruise would hurt less than his bruised ego.

It does him no good anyway, because no matter how much he beats her back with his tiny fists, Mila doesn’t let go—no, Mila starts _spinning._ She spins and spins and spins until Yuri is queasy and sure he’s about to be sick all over the back of her training gear; he thinks it would probably serve her right for being such a jerk in the first place.

But eventually, after what seems like an eternity of him shrieking himself hoarse and flailing his every limb in a vain attempt at freedom, Mila sets him down on the ice.

He is so dizzy and his legs so wobbly, he’s pretty sure he looks like a baby deer. The exit of the rink is _right there_ and there is absolutely no way he will get to it without falling over.

“Say sorry and I’ll help you off the ice.” Mila says, grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire cat.

Yuri’s eye twitches. “I’d rather die, hag.”

She laughs at him, but true to his word, he wobbles off the ice all on his own out of sheer stubbornness.

He spends the next forty-five minutes lying on the bleachers with an arm thrown over his eyes trying to get the room to stop spinning.

He decides he hates Mila.

 

Yuri is twelve years old and decides that learning a triple lutz might be completely impossible, so he has no idea how anyone has ever done a quad lutz in their life.

Which is to say, things are not going well. Worse than things not going well, they are not going well and people around him are noticing. Which is to say everyone stops to watch him attempt the lutz just in time for him to go down. _Hard._

It’s not the first time Yuri’s hit the ice; part of learning is falling down and having the absurd degree of stubbornness it takes to get the hell back up and try again. And Yuri has always been stubborn above all else. But this is the _hardest_ he’s hit the ice in memory (it won’t remain that way for long; there will always be another time and it will always seem to hurt worse than the time before it), and for a second, his vision whites out from the pain. Someone—Viktor—skates over to help him to his feet and Yuri shoves the hand away, stubbornly wobbling to his feet and skating off the ice. He forgets to put his skate guards on and knows that Yakov will somehow psychically know and yell at him later for dulling the blades.

His skates get tossed into a corner of the locker room and he peels off his sweatshirt—already the skin is becoming discoloured, and he knows it’s going to bruise so deep he’ll feel it in his bones, and well, his hip feels even worse. Reluctantly, his leggings are pulled down to expose the purpling flesh of his pale thigh, and he bites his bottom lip to avoid screaming.

It’s not the first time he’s fallen, or the first time he’s been bruised because of skating, but _Christ_ it hurts. He knows he should be grateful he didn’t smack his head on the ice—he knows just about everyone worth a damn in skating has at one point or another been carted off to hospital because of a concussion earned that way.

He’s too busy breathing deep so he doesn’t black out again, or alternatively throw up on the locker room floor, to hear someone come in.

“ _Jesus.”_

His head snaps up to look at Mila, who is looking ever so slightly more grown up these days; the baby fat vanishing from her cheeks and he knows, with a reluctant admittance, that she will be pretty—and he tries to look angry or ferocious or something, but he feels like he looks more like a kitten that has been booted across the room accidentally by its owner.

“You really messed yourself up this time, huh?” She says, though somehow there isn’t anything malicious in it. Not even teasing really. Yuri is about to snap something at her—tell her to _go away_ because he didn’t want her there—when she plops down next to him on the bench and starts digging through her bag.

She produces a small pouch with god knows what in it. More rummaging ensues before she hands him two pills and pulls out some tiger balm.

“Your shoulder, around the back, it’s not doing so great, huh? Can’t do much about the bruising, but y’know. Turn.”

Yuri thinks about telling her to _go away,_ because everything about it makes him feel small and breakable and he is _not breakable._ But he thinks of his Dedushka, and what he’d say if he knew Yuri were screaming at people who just want to help. So he turns and she presses her thumb into the muscle of his shoulder and he _yelps._

“Quit complaining, you baby. It’ll help, I promise. Stop tensing up.”

He tries to stop tensing his shoulders, and it doesn’t really work but she keeps going anyway—at first it hurts, like poking a bruise, but soon after it feels like knots he didn’t even know were there begin to unwind. She works the heel of her palm into the muscles around his shoulder blades, and down his spine. And he’s reluctant to admit that it helps.

“Don’t worry, Yura, you’ll get there. You’re never going to stop falling, but…it gets easier.” Mila says, her voice softer than he’s ever heard it.

“Never?” He whines.

He can’t see her face but he can _hear_ that obnoxious grin on her face. “Never.”

 

Yuri Plisetsky is sixteen years old, and he’s having a panic attack in the bathroom of a skating rink in Finland. It’s not the first time this has happened, it’s not even the first time it’s happened in a foreign country, or at a skating rink (most of his highest highs and lowest lows seem to happen in skating rinks), but this is the worst it’s ever been.

He can’t breathe.

It’s like he’s forgotten how to breathe, how does that even work? Like when he hits the ice too hard and all the air gets forced from his lungs and he can’t seem to force them to work again. But without any goddamn good reason for it, he just feels like he’s crumbling.

_She_ shouldn’t be here.

Skating was a development in his life, a whole area of it that came _after_ Nikita. She shouldn’t be here, she shouldn’t be able to touch this part of his life. He didn’t want her here, he didn’t want her anywhere near him and hadn’t since he was a child. He had taught himself not to want her presence, not to need it.

He’s shaking. He can feel it. His whole body is shaking like he’s been left out in the Russian winter stripped down to his skin, and his eyes are blurry and oh god he can’t breathe, it’s getting worse, and his rib cage feels like it’s getting tighter, constricting his lungs and his heart and it _hurts._

“Yuri? Yura?”

Someone’s speaking to him he knows, but he can’t focus on anything except his heart crashing into his rib cage with every beat, and the voice sounds like its underwater, and even with them in front of him he can’t seem to _focus_ on anything.

“Yura, I need you to just focus on my voice, okay? Can you do that for me?”

_No!_ He wants to scream at the voice, but he can’t, everything just comes out as a breath he didn’t know he was holding until he starts to choke on it.

Hands reach out and grab his shoulders and somewhere, distantly in the back of his mind, he notes that the hands are small, soft, thin fingers—and therefore it’s Mila who’s speaking to him like he can do a damn thing to stop himself from freaking out.

“C’mon kid I know you can do this, you’re too stubborn to let anything—especially _her_ fuck you up this bad. Focus on your breathing okay, nice and slow, follow mine.”

He hates that he’s competitive enough for this to work. That the challenge of _not_ letting her hurt him was too irresistible for his mind not to cling onto. So he does. His breathing slows to follow her own, and he tries to block out any other thought that tries to invade his mind—there are so many, _so many._ Does Dedushka know she’s here? What does she want this time? Money? Fame? Is there any small part of her that regrets abandoning him in favour of an easier child to raise? Did she ever really want him back or was it all just—

_No,_ he’s not thinking about that.

It takes longer than he ever wants to admit to, but his breathing slows down. The very hazy world comes back into focus and he can see Mila’s face and she looks…worried. He doesn’t know why that’s surprising—he’s a fucking mess at the moment and he knows it and in a few minutes, he’s going to want her to swear on her life she’ll never tell anyone how _afraid_ he was—but he’s never seen her look so openly worried about…anything, really. Let alone him.

She smiles shakily at him, tucks a lock of hair behind his ear that in all the fuss must have come out of his ponytail. “There you are. You really had me going for a second there, you know that? Do you need anything? Water? Space? I think Vitya’s going to get into a fist fight with _her_ if you want to go watch.”

A shaky sound he recognises as a laugh escapes him and he shakes his head no. He’s fine. He’ll be fine. He just…needs a second. She smiles more solidly at her and takes his hands in her own and gives them a firm, comforting squeeze.

It would be many years later that Yuri would realise a certain Kazakh skater might have been his best friend, but he was far from his first.

 

Yuri is eighteen years old and has consumed more vodka in the past half hour than he has in the rest of his life combined. He blames Mila.

Because it had been Mila’s idea to go out for Yuri’s birthday—for all that people might think otherwise, he was something of a homebody when he wasn’t skating and had plans with some pirozhki Dedushka had sent him, Potya and maybe catching up on some Netflix he hadn’t been able to watch due to training. It wasn’t glamourous, but it would have been _nice,_ and really that was all he’d wanted.

But Mila had insisted, that morning at the very brief training session he’d had before Yakov had told him to go home and enjoy his birthday, that one did not simply _do nothing_ for their eighteenth. They were Russian, and that meant it was an occasion for drinking.

Which is how he ended up in a nightclub in Saint Petersburg—which makes it the second whole time he’s ever been in a nightclub, the first involving Otabek, a rock song and a series of bad decisions regarding a skating program—and Mila is handing him his fifth (sixth?) shot of the night.

“Remind me again why we’re doing this?” He drawls at her, making a face before downing the shot—he wasn’t a big drinker, but by god was he Russian, and that meant not being a little bitch when someone handed you vodka. He’d be a disgrace to his homeland if he couldn’t drink it.

“Because you haven’t gone anywhere that wasn’t your apartment or the rink in exactly five weeks. Also it’s your birthday and as your best friend—in the country!—it’s my job to make sure you don’t waste your eighteenth birthday watching Netflix with your cat.”

He hates that she knew without him saying a word exactly what he was planning on doing.

So there he is, in his tightest jeans and a _mesh crop top_ (he wished he could say Mila made him buy it but it was a _lie_ ), in an extremely loud nightclub, having drunk enough vodka to make his toes tingle.

All in all, it’s not as bad as he thought it would be.

“C’mon, let’s dance.” Mila says, and she says it in a way which practically challenges him to try and defy her—and subsequently prove himself _boring._ It was a trap, one that he was absolutely going to fall into.

“—fine!”

Mila grins at him like the Cheshire cat, and drags him off—and right around then two things happen;

  1. All the shots they’ve taken hit him square in the face.
  2. He remembers that despite being a skater and ballet dancer, he has no idea how to dance in a club.



He thinks he might die.

But Mila doesn’t seem to notice, or she otherwise doesn’t care. Instead she drags him squarely into the middle of the crowd of people, and starts dancing, making a face at him when he, for the first time in quite a while, doesn’t seem to know what to do with any of his limbs. Hands settle on his hips and she starts moving him in time to the music until he loosens up and starts to be able to follow along himself.

“There you go.” She says, smiling proudly—or at least he thinks she does, he can’t really hear much over the incessant beat of the mindless techno music being played. He thinks dully that Beka’s stuff sounds better.

Still, like the moron he is, he preens and grins under the compliment and they dance, and they dance, and the world comes in and out of focus in a way he, for once, doesn’t mind at all. The drinks start to mess with his head a little, and he can’t find it in him to care, his eyes won’t focus on anything, but the smell of Mila’s perfume is familiar and soothing in a way it never has been before.

Three hours and four shots later, they’re sitting outside the club on the curb waiting for an uber home—well, an uber back to Mila’s apartment because Yuri still hasn’t found a place on his own and he doesn’t even want to _think_ about stumbling home drunk to Lilia’s—his head on her shoulder and her head atop his, having given up standing because as it turns out, presently, Yuri is quite bad at it.

“Milayaaa.” He drawls at her, every syllable sliding into the next in an affection slur.

“Yuraaa.” She slurs back at him.

“I love you. You’re…you’re good. Thank you for taking me out even if I didn’t really wanna go.” He mumbles, eyes falling shut, feeling peaceful for a moment. “Maybe this’s what having siblings’s like. ‘cause you make me _so mad_ sometimes, but I think if y’asked, I’d kill someone for you. Even if it was Vitya—maybe especially him. But anyone. ‘s’long as it’s not my cat.” He blindly reaches out to pat her arm, opening his eyes is too much effort he’s decided.

“Sweet Yurochka, I knew there was a heart under all that ice.” She coos back at him in a way that makes him think he might regret this later. “Love you too, brat. Forever and ever. We’re family now—you, an’ me, an’ Gosha and Vitya, which— _oh god—_ makes Yakov and Lilia mom and dad.” She bursts into a fit of giggles at the thought.

“Milochka why would you say that. Why. We were having a moment.”

“ _You_ were having a drunken moment. C’mon, up, I think that’s the uber.”

“’kay.”

 

Yuri is twenty years old and he is so sick of hearing about Mila’s failed love life.

He loves her, adores her even—she’s like the sister he never had (discounting the fact that he now has a sister)—but her dating mishaps have always been that; mishaps. She says she’s not rebounding and then she is, and then it’s going badly and then—

Well, and then there was that one time she dumped some hockey guy and he hadn’t gotten the message to leave her the hell alone and Yuri had _punched him_ even though the guy’d had a solid hundred pounds on him and he almost ended up with a broken nose, but it had been _worth_ it.

Usually it didn’t go like that. Usually, they left her alone and she was sad and went out a little too much after practice until Yakov yelled at her for being hungover and trying to land a salchow.

But today is very different. It might even be important; he can tell because she asks him to sit down before she tells him about her newest tryst—rather than just trying to throw it purposefully casually into a conversation and hoping he just runs with it instead of calling her out on whatever bullshit she’s on this time.

“—I’m dating Sara Crispino.”

_Huh._

Somehow not what he expected her to say—not for the reasons one might think. It wasn’t like Yuri was under the illusion that a single one of the skaters he’d shared a rink with were straight; even Georgi had not proven disappointing enough to be _that._ Besides, he’d been at more than a few after parties with Mila and could say with absolute certainty that she liked girls just as much as she liked burly hockey players.

At least in theory.

In practice, he both can’t really remember her ever being serious about a girl—or being this serious about anyone in general.

“Like…dating-dating?”

Not the most eloquent answer he could have come out with, but this wasn’t a conversation he thought he was going to have to have at nine in the morning, fresh out of Lilia’s ballet studio with his calves still aching from the work out.

“Yes. It’s…serious. I think. I really like her, Yura. She’s…different. And she gets it y’know? It’s so…hard to explain what skating is like to someone who doesn’t get it.” Mila replied, exasperation briefly flashing across her face.

He did know. It had been almost impossible to explain to anyone why skating was so important to him and why he had to get up at five am every goddamn morning and why his feet were always bloody and bruised from his skates, why he was always travelling.

There was a reason that at a certain level, all skaters sort of begrudgingly bonded—because it was a strange life to live, and almost impossible to make someone outside of it understand. All anyone had to do was watch the disastrous love life of Victor before he got married, or Mila, to see that it was _hard_ to make someone understand.

But equally so, there were problems that came with dating inside such a small, tight knit community.

“You’re really serious about this? You’re sure? Because if you’re not and this goes bad, there’s no way in hell you’ll be able to ignore it.” He cautioned—like he had any idea what it was like. But…well. There had been more than a few instances of someone dating within the small community of ranking skaters, it not working, and then them having to suffer through seeing their ex at every competition until their career expired.

It was awkward for everyone involved—including him, who had never done anything half as stupid as date another skater. Of course, that would require him dating much of anyone really.

Mila makes a face, like she’s going back and forth on it, before taking a deep breath and nodding. “I’m sure. I’m serious about it. She’s…she’s special, Yuri. We’ve been friends for what feels like our whole lives. She was the first friend I made at competition, it just feels…right.” She paused for a moment. “—and if it doesn’t work out…well…I can just avoid her until she retires.”

Which, Yuri thought, could be another good two or three years—Sara had been extremely lucky as far as injuries went. She was still doing well for a skater of twenty-seven.

“If you’re sure, Milaya. I just don’t want you doing something stupid and getting hurt.” He said without thinking, and she made a face at him—the _you showed an emotion_ face. “Not because I give a shit, but because I don’t want to listen to you complain about it!”

“Sure, Yura. Sure. Good talk.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just…be careful.”

“Got it.”

“…I’m happy for you.”

“I know, Yura.”

 

Yuri Plisetsky is twenty-five years old, and he can’t remember the last time he went more than about a week without seeing Mila’s stupid face.

He’s reluctant to admit he sort of likes it that way. Mila has never, not for a second, put up with any of his bullshit. She won’t even entertain the idea of it, and never will. As much as he hates it sometimes, he knows he needs it. Needs her. But he can’t say he didn’t see this coming, they all saw it coming.

“I’m thinking of retiring, brat.” She tells him, sitting on the patio of a café in Saint Petersburg in the chilly morning air.

“Giving up already, hag?” He replies without even thinking; because the alternative is to admit that not seeing her at the rink every day makes his heart clench painfully. His fault for getting so attached to all these morons—he supposes, he hoped she’d stick around. What with Georgi retired, and Victor coaching now (it’s still not the same, it never will be). Hell, even Katsudon has retired. There are new skaters, younger skaters at the rink—they look at him the way he used to look at Victor—but it’s not the same.

It feels like the end of an era.

“I’m old and tired, brat, I need to learn how to sleep in.” She takes a deep breath. “And I think it’s time Sara and I settle down, y’know? All this travelling and being apart it’s not…it’s not good for us. I think it’s time, don’t you?”

“I think you’ve still got at least another season in you.” He challenges, hoping she’ll rise to it—but she doesn’t. He knew she wouldn’t.

“Yeah, a pretty lacklustre one. It’s…It’s time Yura. You know that. I know you do. If I stayed on it’d just be…disappointing for everyone.” She’s looking at him but he’s examining the foam on top of his caramel latte with laser like focus. Anywhere that isn’t her. His eyes start to sting. He knew this was coming but it’s still.

“I can’t imagine you not being around anymore.” He admits finally, proud of himself for keeping his voice even, calm, conversational.

“Oh Yura…” She reaches across the table, puts her hand atop his—warm, where his are cold. “I’m still going to be around—leaving skating behind doesn’t mean I’m leaving _you_ behind. Who’d keep you out of trouble then? Who’d hound you about your poor excuse for a social life? Huh? No, can’t leave you behind. You’d die without me.”

“Yeah right.” He snorts, but it sounds wet from the tears that are welling up in his eyes.

“I love you, you know that right?”

“Duh, Baba, of course I do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're officially halfway through! Next up is Georgi, updates are on Wednesday and Saturday AEST +10 in case anyone was wondering. Hope you're enjoying the fic so far! Comments are super welcome.


	6. Georgi Popovich

Yuri Plisetsky is eight years old and thinks one of his new rinkmates might be completely insane.

He’s not sure what exactly it is about Georgi Popovich; or rather, he’s not sure if it’s any one thing or just a combination of every bizarre thing about him that makes Yuri sure he might be out of his mind. Mostly he thinks it’s because Yuri has been training at the rink for exactly a week and he has seen Georgi openly weep approximately three times. No one else seems to think this is strange—none of them really stop or do anything about it, they just sigh like this is something irksome but necessary that happens commonly and continue on with their day.

Sometimes Mila stops to ask Georgi if he needs anything, only to end up listening to all his many woes about some girl (Anya? Anna? Alina? Yuri’s not sure, he stopped listening after the first time it happened) for the next half hour—or until Yakov yells at them both to get it together and get back to training.

Either way, this was apparently completely normal behaviour for him, and Yuri was expected to treat it as such.

But it was driving Yuri up the wall. He knew he had promised Dedushka he was going to behave, he was going to be nice to his rinkmates—because in all likelihood he was going to be stuck with them for a very, _very_ long time. But Dedushka had never met Georgi Popovich nor had to listen to him wail about some girl who probably didn’t really care.

“What the hell are you doing now?” Yuri asks finally after watching him stumble over the right starting position and the first three steps of his program for a whole five minutes—the worst part of it all was the fact that Yuri knew Georgi was a good skater. He knows. He’s watched him skate before at Rostelecom, he wouldn’t be there if he wasn’t talented and hardworking.

But that doesn’t mean he’s not a mess.

“Little kids shouldn’t talk like that.” He huffs at Yuri, like saying it is going to change Yuri’s mind about what a moron he’s being. (Hint: it won’t.)

“Well too bad ‘cause they do! What are you doing?” He demands, glaring up at Georgi with all the ferocity of a kitten who thinks itself a lion.

“Getting into starting position. Training.”

“No, you’re not. You’ve been wobbling and doing it wrong, even I know that and I’m _eight._ ”

Georgi makes a face like he wants to tell Yuri to get lost but he’s trying to be nice—which sucks for him because Yuri is definitely not trying to be nice. “I’m having trouble focusing.” He finally says after spending a moment debating saying anything, while Yuri debated whether or not tapping his foot—in skates, on the ice—would be worth the dramatic effect even if Yakov would totally yell at him for it.

“Why?”

“Because of a girl.”

“That’s dumb.”

“Love is not dumb!”

“Then I guess that makes _you_ dumb.”

“You wouldn’t understand, you’re too young!”

(As it turned out this was true, but also not true at all. He didn’t understand love because he was too young, but Yuri wouldn’t understand this specific woe even when he was older; he simply didn’t like girls.)

“You’re being ridiculous. Skating is more important than a girl.”

Georgi sighed dreamily. “You just wouldn’t understand.”

Georgi was right: he didn’t.

 

Yuri is fifteen years old, extremely sleep deprived and hates asking for help. Unfortunately for him, he lives in a world in which asking for help is not optional. It’s something he has to do in order to a) survive and b) not stagnate in his career. Both things necessary in order to avoid making a complete ass of himself—something he generally doesn’t like even more than he dislikes asking for help.

“I need your help with something.” The words sound like he’s choking on them, but he said them and that’s all that counts.

Georgi looks both confused and affronted that anyone would wake him up this early—specifically that Yuri would wake him up at all. As a general rule, they didn’t talk much, weren’t close and Yuri seldom sought him out. Let alone early in the morning on the day of his first senior exhibition skate.

Which might have undergone some tweaking after a long night of hard work with Otabek.

Still, despite all of this, Yuri is allowed into his room.

He drops a grocery bag from a minimart around the corner on Georgi’s clearly very recently slept in bed. Inside is a cheap black eyeshadow, a pair of aviator sunglasses and some wash out purple hair dye. This is what everyone gets for leaving him unsupervised in a foreign country.

“You’re going to help me dye streaks in my hair and then you’re going to do my makeup. For the exhibition skate.” He says calmly, like this is a perfectly reasonably thing to ask and Georgi is a perfectly reasonable person to be asking.

“…right. Okay. Does Yakov know about this? Maybe I’ve been completely oblivious for the past few months--,” Basically he had, he’d been slightly useless since Anya had broken up with him, but Yuri had come to expect it and not violently begrudge him that. “—but I don’t remember anything about your exhibition skate calling for purple hair dye.”

“Some last-minute changes were made. Yakov knows all about it.” A lie if he’d ever told one. Yakov was going to murder him for this, only if Lilia didn’t do it first, but it was going to be worth it goddamn it. He needed to do something that was authentically him. His short program had been all Victor—even when it was _him_ —and his free had Lilia written all over it. He just needed to show that he wasn’t either of them, that he had something himself that was worth seeing. He needed not to be Victor’s successor or Lilia’s protégé for a minute. He needed to be himself.

And maybe, just maybe, rebel a little.

“…right.” Everything about Georgi’s tone said he didn’t believe a word he said, but he didn’t kick Yuri out. He just sighed and grabbed the hair dye and started walking toward the bathroom. “You said you just wanted streaks?”

“Uh, yeah, streaks are good.”

“Well hurry up, I don’t have all day and you don’t either.”

The whole thing went even better than Yuri could have imagined—even with Katsudon and Victor trying to upstage him at the last minute with their stupid gross romantic pair skate—and he’d successfully dodged Yakov and Lilia for the moment.

However, in dodging them he runs right into Georgi and almost lands on his ass.

“Judging by the fact that you’re fleeing for your life I’m gonna go ahead and say you lied about Yakov approving the new program.” He drawls at Yuri.

“—don’t fucking lie you knew from minute one he didn’t know shit about the changes to my skate.” Yuri growls, glancing around to make sure he’s not about to be set upon by one of his coaches.

“Maybe. But if they ask I had nothing to do with this.”

“Of course.” Yuri huffs at him, incensed by the implication that he would ever be a snitch. What follows is an awkward silence, because he’ll be honest—Yuri can’t quite remember the last time he spent more than a moment or two speaking to Georgi, which now that he thinks about it sounds _horrible._ Finally, he thrusts out his hand. “Give me your phone.”

Georgi, understandably, looks confused and then suspicious. “Why?”

“Just give me your fucking phone, Popovich!” He hisses at him, only slightly calming down when Georgi relents and hands it over. He punches in his number—and decidedly doesn’t comment on the fact that inexplicably, despite having known each other for _seven years,_ he never thought to give it to him before.

Georgi looks suitably touched by the gesture, and the moment is mercifully ruined when Yakov comes around the corner and starts _screaming,_ and Yuri _bolts_ in fear of his life.

 

Yuri is seventeen and suddenly technical skills are not going to be enough to get him to the top; he’s awkward and lanky and hasn’t figured out why his centre of balance has shifted so much over a few inches in height.

But if he doesn’t want to get dropped from the Olympic team, his scores need a boost in another area. Which means asking for help and trying not to choke on the words; it’s not the first time he’s asked Georgi for help, he just wishes it was the last.

“—I need your help with something.” He says through gritted teeth. Again. He can’t believe he has to do this _again_. He’s cornered Georgi on the bleachers by the rink, and unintentionally said it in the most insidious way possible. Georgi looks like he fears for his life—it’s potentially too early for this shit, but Yuri had to get up at five am for ballet with Lilia so if he has to suffer this morning, everyone does.

“…As long as it doesn’t involve moving a body or committing any kind of federal crime.” He replies, far too quickly for him to not have considered it before.

Yuri is pretty sure he shouldn’t be pleased by the idea that his rinkmates all think him completely capable of murder, but he is, he really is.

“—Your programs always tell stories. Even if they’re stupid and involve witches and heartbreak and bad make up.” Georgi quirks an eyebrow at the makeup comment, and he can just smell a snarky rebuttal about that exhibition skate when he was fifteen, so he cuts him off before he can even begin. “And I need to be able to do that. Now more than ever. So you’re going to help me.”

Yuri finds that often, the best way to ask for help isn’t really to ask at all, but rather inform someone that they’re going to be helping him with such a no-nonsense tone of voice, no room is left for them to say no. If he had to guess, he’d say he learned it from Lilia.

He seems to ponder this for a minute, eyeing Yuri up and down like he’s looking for a sign of some kind of ploy in the works, or a hidden motive. There isn’t one—everyone knows how much his skating has suffered since his growth spurt; everyone’s seen him hit the ice _hard_ a dozen or more times a day. Even someone in his own head as much as Georgi must surely have noticed. “…that’s substantially less awful than having to help you move a dead body, so I guess I can try.”

“Good. We start now. Right now. Get up and meet me on the ice.” And off Yuri goes, barely stopping to remove his skate guards.

As it turns out, learning how to skate while telling a story is about as difficult as learning to put more emotion in his skates—extremely fucking hard. He doesn’t know why he thought he could do this.

“You’ve got to really embody the character, feel what they’re feeling—and always choose to tell a story that you can relate to. Don’t tell some dramatic love story if you feel apathetic at best. Storytelling is about emotion; about getting other people to feel your feelings and the characters feelings as if they were their own. It’s about empathy.” Georgi says all of this with dramatic, flailing hand gestures—like he’s incapable of talking without his hands.

“None of that is helpful! I asked you to tell me how to do it, not wax poetic about your feelings! Again!” He half shrieks at the man, who shakes his head in turn—another _you just wouldn’t understand._

“—you can tell a story about victory. You always did like winning. There are hundreds of compositions written about famous battles; maybe try something along those lines. Embody the determination to win. The desperate nature of it.”

He didn’t like the implication that he was _desperate_ to win, even if it was true.

“Try sharp movements; you’re always so graceful, that’s Lilia’s doing I think. Try something sharp, almost jagged or raw, but purposeful. Like this.” He watches carefully as Georgi moves, furrowing his brow at it.

“How is that any different from what you were doing earlier?”

Georgi sighs. “Watch again.”

And so he does. He spends the better part of an hour watching Georgi do the same short step sequence with different emotions; different backstories to each individual one, and then has to guess what exactly he was trying to embody. It’s incredibly frustrating, but by the end of it…

“I think you’ve got it. Almost. Still needs some practice, but I think it’ll end up being a little less…ballerina, and a little more Yura.”

 

Yuri is eighteen years old, and it’s been three weeks since Georgi retired.

There was quite a bit of fanfare surrounding the whole thing; everyone at the rink had said farewell, there’d been several articles floating around about the fact that Georgi Popovich had had a long and successful career, longer than many Russian skaters, notorious for peaking at sixteen and teetering off as they entered their adult years. But at almost thirty, Georgi’s career was lengthy and fruitful.

None of this changed the fact that it hadn’t been age or choice that ended Georgi’s career, but rather an injury.

They all knew it was a possibility; it happened all the time. It didn’t matter how old you were. Sometimes you went down, or landed badly, and you never got up. Some people healed; knee reconstructions and surgery on the Achilles tendons were par for course among figure skaters, but some people never quite recovered. And sometimes, there was nothing to be done; skating destroyed the body. They all knew it. None of them had any illusions about it. For a few short years of glory, they inflicted upon themselves a life of pain.

It’s not uncommon for things to go badly after that.

By which Yuri means he was willing to ignore the first few times Georgi poked his head in at the rink and looked at it like a lost love greater than any experienced before—Yuri didn’t even want to think about life after skating, not yet. He still had several good years left.

But at some point, someone had to do something about it.

“Oi! Popovich! You just gonna stand in the doorway like some kind of creep or you coming in?” He shouted from the ice, drawing the attention of some of the other skaters—most quickly went back to what they were doing. Terrible as it was, no one really wanted to think about what would happen when their careers inevitably crashed and burned. Not everyone had it in them for coaching or commentating.

Georgi looks like a deer caught in the headlights and Yuri almost feels bad for a second—almost—but he comes inside, sits down on the bleachers still all bundled up in his coat from outside. An odd sight indeed. He skates over to the barrier.

“You look like shit, Gosha.” He states bluntly, and Georgi makes a face but doesn’t argue.

“Don’t feel so great either. What are you working on?”

“Yakov let me make some changes to my short program before Worlds, wanna make sure I get it perfect. Can’t let the piggy beat me again or I’ll lose my fucking mind.” He says, because this part has always been easy—talking about skating. Except for the part where it isn’t anymore, because he can’t ask Georgi how that quad-triple combo he had in his free program is going—he only landed it like forty percent of the time, but Yakov let him keep it in there anyway, like a goalpost.

They fall silent for a moment.

There’s something utterly soul-crushing about the look on Georgi’s face when he glances up from his boots to the ice—watches Mila off in the distance land a quad salchow with utter reverence. Like this is a holy place and he is trespassing.

“This is fucking pathetic.” Yuri comments suddenly. He doesn’t think before he speaks—which isn’t all that uncommon, but he swears he’s fucking trying to do better about it. But god, sometimes people just make him so _frustrated._

Georgi’s expression turns sour. “Not everyone can still be young and have their whole career ahead of them, Yurochka.” He hisses.

“This has nothing to do with skating.” It had everything to do with skating. “It’s the fact that you’re letting yourself be so fucking defeated over something; you fucking specialise in turning your bullshit emotions into something productive. That’s the only reason you lasted this long; because every single stupid thing that went wrong, you turned into a skate and used it for something better.”

“Yeah, and now I can’t skate—”

“So find something else to do with it! Take up painting, hell, come here and teach the brat novices how to not fall flat on their fucking faces every five minutes. Take up knitting, write a damn book, see if I fucking care, just do _something,_ because this? This is pitiful. And I refuse to have ever shared ice with someone _pitiful._ ”

He doesn’t know quite why he’s so angry about it; maybe it’s concern masked as anger, he’s been told that just about every emotion he has comes out with anger when he doesn’t want to deal with it. Or maybe it’s because Georgi is the first of his rinkmates to be permanently put out of commission with an injury—Victor had retired of his own accord to pursue coaching, he _could_ have stayed on longer, his body would have allowed it (not for much longer, but a _little_ )—and now Yuri is looking painfully at what might be his own mortality.

_What if that’s me? Not in ten years, but ten months? What if I fuck up one of my jump practices and shatter my ankle? What if I dislocate my knee like Giacometti did? What if my career is over in a heartbeat like Georgi’s was? Before I’m ready for it?_

But something on Gosha’s face shifts and he thinks, maybe, for once he might have said the right thing.

“I…you’re right.”

Yuri nods. “Of course I am.” He had no idea whether or not he was right. None at all.

“I just…it’s hard, y’know? I keep waking up in the morning, and for a second I forget. I look at my phone and I think I’m gonna be late for practice. I keep walking out the door with my skates in my bag without even _thinking_ about it. And then I remember…”

Yuri huffs, but stays quiet for a minute.

“Look, it fucking sucks and I’m not going to tell you otherwise. But…well. You had a good run. Better than a lot of people do. And the sky isn’t gonna fucking fall just because you can’t skate anymore. Might feel like it but it won’t. Take up coaching—choreography even, you’ve always been good at that shit. Hell, go write for one of those skating blogs, they’d be fucking thrilled to get someone from our rink writing for them. You’re not gonna fucking die—and we’re all still gonna be here if you need us. So stop pitying yourself and deal with it, because you’re starting to piss me off, alright?”

And for the first time since the accident, Georgi smiles. It strikes Yuri as momentarily disturbing, but he squashes that thought instantly. “Y’know, sometimes it really surprises me how far you’ve come from that obnoxious brat who harassed Yakov into training you. You were insufferable, you know that? Said you were gonna dethrone Vitya on your first day here—you were about as tall as his knee.”

“Fuck off, I was not _that_ small. I was a perfectly normal height for my age.”

“—maybe not that far after all.”

“ _Fuck you Popovich!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter is Yuuri and Yuri--possibly my favourite dynamic on the show. So hopefully the chapter is just as good. Will be posted on Wednesday (Australian time!).


	7. Yuuri Katsuki

Yuri Plisetsky is thirteen years old when he starts daydreaming of finally being able to join senior competition.

Unfortunately, the ISU has some strong feelings about when exactly he should be allowed to do so; and that isn’t for another two years at least. Yakov has it in his head that he’s going to be able to convince Yuri to hold off until he’s eighteen to join Seniors, but Yakov has a screw loose if he thinks Yuri isn’t signing up for senior competition the second he turns fifteen.

As such he’s been keeping an eye on anyone he might soon consider competition; aside from Victor of course. That was a given.

The one who had been the most surprising thus far was someone who, coincidentally, was also named Yuri. Or Yuuri. He wasn’t too clear on that.

Yuuri Katsuki, figure skater from Japan.

He wasn’t much of a jumper, that was for sure. Yuri was certain he could beat him solely on technical score as it stood already. But his _step sequences._ Now those were something; of course, Victor was supposedly the best at absolutely everything. But Yuuri Katsuki’s footwork was beyond incredible, his interpretation of choreography was amazing.

The fact that he clearly had his roots in ballet the way Yuri himself did certainly wasn’t hurting this little bias—though he was going to kick Mila if she referred to it as a crush one more time. It _wasn’t_ a crush, it was just…professional admiration. The way he might admire Vitya if he didn’t have to see him every day of his damn life and know firsthand exactly how obnoxious he was.

Technically he shouldn’t have been there, watching the senior competition—he should have been training, preparing for his own competition. But he’d wanted to scope out to the other senior skaters—there were a few newer ones who hadn’t been around the circuit as many times, ones they didn’t know well enough yet.

So he hides at the back of the bleachers as he watches Yuuri Katsuki skate his free program, and definitely, absolutely does not sigh dreamily—it was just the skating, he swears!

But there was undeniably something about Yuuri’s skating that he found utterly captivating—judging by how quiet the crowd was as he skated, how enraptured, he was far from the only one who thought so.

Yuuri doesn’t win of course, because Victor is there, and Victor always wins, and his jumps are still not great, but it doesn’t matter. Because by the time they let Yuri enter Seniors, he’ll be even better and then he can see how he measures up.

 

Yuri Plisetsky is fourteen and he feels like he’s watching a car crash in slow motion.

He doesn’t know what happened—he doesn’t know what in the world could ever possibly account for how fucking _awful_ Yuuri Katsuki is skating. He flubs jumps that even he regularly lands, his infamous step sequences are off, he seems to be trembling, not from exertion but from the nerves. It’s all so, so wrong.

And somehow it feels like the universe itself is punishing Yuri specifically—he’s just won what will be his final junior title, the medal is safely tucked away in his suitcase, ready to fly home and show his Dedushka, and put it with all the others—and soon, _soon,_ he’s going to be in Seniors. He’s finally going to have the chance to skate head to head with Victor, with Yuuri Katsuki, with everyone else and prove that he deserves a seat at the table, and it doesn’t matter that he’s young or not the tallest or hell, even that his attitude is bad. What matters is that he can _skate._

Yet here he is, watching someone he had flagged in his mind as competition—someone whose career he’d taken a vested interest in for the last year—completely crashes and burns. It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen before, and god knows he’s seen his fair share of skaters panicking and completely failing at their damn programs.

Then the skate is over, and Yuri stands up abruptly and leaves—he doesn’t want to listen to Mila tease him about his ‘little crush’ doing so poorly, disappointment and embarrassment bubble to the surface as rage and he pushes through the crowd and down into the bowels of the rink.

“ _There’s only room for one Yuri in this division.”_

He doesn’t know why he does it really. He doesn’t know why all his feelings seem to come out as anger, he was just _so disappointed._ Seeing Katsuki as a trembling, blubbering mess in the damn bathrooms of the rink isn’t making his disappointment lessen any.

How could he have looked up to someone so… _weak?_ How could he have been so stupid as to flag _this moron_ as competition for himself?

(except it’s not stupidest as much as it is childish, bitter disappointment, because he had wanted so badly to skate alongside someone who _understood,_ someone who skated the same way he did, wanted to prove that he deserved to skate alongside people like Yuuri Katsuki—or the person he thought Yuuri Katsuki was the first time he’d seen him skate).

He hates himself a little bit, later, for doing it. Yelling at him at his weakest—as if Katsuki was meant to know that he had disappointed Yuri personally, when they’d never met before today and Yuri had _yelled at him_ like a freak.

He steals a glass or four of champagne at the banquet when he’s not meant to have anything other than soda—Mila will teasingly chide him about it, only to sneak him drinks anyway. Occasionally, she’s not the worst.

His extremities start to tingle, and he makes several bad choices in rapid succession that night; he remembers very little of them, but knows they happened, has photos for posterity (which is more than can be said for Katsuki, who he’ll learn later has no fucking idea _any_ of it happened), but what he does remember is this;

Standing at the edge of the room, leaning against a wall with an almost empty glass of champagne in hand, tingly and the world ever so slightly blurry at the edges, watching as Yuuri Katsuki steals Victor right from under him.

He can see it in Victor’s eyes, how _captivated_ he is with Katsuki, and Yuri feels fucking stupid for believing either of two things;

Thing the first: that he was special for being so enthralled with Yuuri Katsuki as a skater, and thinking he knew the first thing about him as a person.

Thing the second: that he mattered enough to Victor that he’d remember his promises, that Yuri would ever be a priority to him.

“Looks like Victor’s stolen your little crush.” Mila teases, slumping against the wall beside him.

He flushes red all the way up his neck to his high cheekbones and slams the half-drunk glass of champagne onto the table beside them.

“He can keep him.”

He storms back to his room with no intention of leaving until their flight home.

 

Yuri is sixteen years old and wants to drown Victor in the locker room sink.

Because of course it was inevitable that Victor and Katsudon would end up training in Saint Petersburg—Victor got homesick far too easily for all that he was a flighty, well-travelled bastard. So it seemed it would be a _year on year off_ arrangement where Katsudon’s training was concerned.

Which means, regrettably, Katsudon has moved into the rink and Yuri shall never again know peace because Victor won’t stop cooing over him like he’s the best thing to happen since pirozhki. And he _hates_ it.

Just because he’d decided the piggy wasn’t the single most annoying, idiotic, _disappointing_ person on the planet did not mean he was prepared to listen to Victor wax poetic about how fantastic he was at everything for _twelve hours a day, every fucking day._ It was downright maddening. Maybe it was unfair of him to take this out on Katsudon himself—who would not control Victor any better than anyone else could, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care.

And so begins a long campaign of refusing any form of casual or fond interaction between the two of them.

“Yurio! Do you want this other pastry? I thought I was hungrier than I was--,” The piggy begins.

It’s from Yuri’s favourite bakery. “No, I don’t want your fucking leftovers.” His stomach rumbles. He accidentally skipped breakfast this morning. He keeps his head high even when Katsudon gives him a _look._ Yuri waits him out, and the man eventually shrugs and goes to offer it to Mila.

God he’s hungry.

“Hey, Yurio! We’re going out to get coffee, do you want to join—,”

“I’m too fucking busy and I don’t particularly feel like having to watch you two be gross in public for all of my lunch break so no, I don’t.” He snarls back.

Regretfully, Katsudon seems to have realised that Yuri is a lot more bark than he is bite and doesn’t so much as flinch when Yuri snarls at him. Just smiles kindly, _knowingly,_ and walks off to meet Victor by the entrance to the rink.

He hates that knowing smile more than he knows how to put into words. He _hates_ being looked at like he’s been figured out completely. It’s nothing short of maddening.

“Do you want some help with that?”

Yuri grits his teeth and sways—determined not to drop anything he was carrying because he was a stubborn idiot and refused to make two trips from the storage room to the rink. “No, no I do not, so keep walking.”

Apparently, he’s just a sucker for punishment.

“Oh my god, are you okay?”

The figure skating toward him is blurry—but based on colour alone, and that absurdly, obnoxiously sincere tone in his voice, he just _knows_ that it’s Katsudon.

Yuri’s not too sure of anything else, mostly on account of him having just _smacked_ his head on the ice hard enough to make him see stars and also make him vaguely nauseas—one of the novices had been in his practice space and he’d had to jerk to the side when coming in for a jump landing and everything had been literally downhill from there.

God his head hurts.

He mumbles something unintelligible which sounds like “mmhmrph” that was meant to be something along the lines if _of course I’m okay, piggy, so go the hell away._ It doesn’t come out quite like he plans. He wants to tell him to leave well enough alone, wants to scream at him to go away, doesn’t want any more attention than has already inevitably be drawn by his harsh landing, but he can’t seem to speak.

He’d better not be concussed or he’s gonna be pissed.

Someone’s pulling him to his feet and he goes without much effort because he can’t really feel his anything at the moment. It’s all sort of fuzzy.

“Hang on, Yurio, let’s get you over here, you might be concussed.”

_Fuck off, I’m not concussed._

(spoiler: he was mildly concussed)

“Easy, easy you’re alright, I’ve got you.”

By the time the world makes a little more sense, he’s sitting by the side of the rink, his skates are off and Katsudon is still staring down at him like a worried mother—not that he’d ever had a worried mother to care when he fell on the ice like a moron and hurt himself.

“I’m _fine,_ it was just a fall—I’m good. I’m fine. I just…need…” _Something._ He didn’t know. Water. A nap. Food. To not have fucking smacked his head on the ice like a dumbass, _seriously,_ what the fuck was that about? Stupid novice.

Katsudon put up a hand to silence him. “That may be the case—you may be perfectly fine. But if there’s the slightest chance you’re not, then we should do something about it. You’re going home, right now. I’ll drive you, you’ve had enough practice for today. Then we’ll see how you’re doing after some rest—if you’re concussed you shouldn’t be on the ice.”

Yuri balked.

“But I need to--,” It was in that moment that Katsudon looked at him with such stern concern-slash-disappointment that it reminded him momentarily of Dedushka, and he was forced into compliance. “Fine. Take me home then.”

He has to give Katsudon directions to Lilia’s apartment—which is still absurdly lavish and has far too much space for a woman who, prior to him moving in a year ago, lived completely alone. He could tell by the look on his companion’s face that he felt similarly.

“Holy—you live here?”

Yuri shrugs, settling on the couch and letting Potya climb all over him. “It’s Lilia’s apartment—she has an in-home studio to practice in, so she made me move in last year when she started as my choreographer.”

It’s around then that he remembers people find his life to be something of an oddity.

Still, he curls up in the many, _many_ throw pillows on the couch with Potya and squints as the older man bustles around the kitchen—Lilia would be furious he’d even let someone in the front door, let alone rearrange her kitchen.

Not that she ever really cooked anything in it—all of their meals arrived weekly from some fancy nutritionist. All they did was heat them up.

“What are you doing? If you mess up Lilia’s kitchen, she’ll murder you, and no amount of pleading from the old man will save you.” He grumbles—feeling and sounding less like a tiger and more like an unloved kitten.

“Oh, I just…I thought since you were sick I would try and make you katsudon pirozhki’s but I’m not really sure where you keep everything.”

The worst part about the whole thing was that he looked so goddamn sincere, it warmed something in Yuri’s icy little heart that had maybe been knocked loose by the concussion. He really wished he hadn’t smacked his head on the ice like a complete moron.

But after directing Yuuri to the nearest grocery store and shouting instructions and directions to him from the couch for an hour or two, they share a plate of pirozhki’s and maybe…well maybe it’s not so bad, getting along.

 

Yuri is eighteen and he doesn’t know where Beka went which is a problem because it means he is alone at this wedding and therefore open to being spoken to by various people he’s trying to avoid.

Namely the groom and the other groom.

Obviously, they were both feeling particularly weepy today, and Yuri’d already had his fill during the ceremony.

(if anyone asked, he absolutely did not cry. Never mind that Otabek had absolutely filmed him crying during the vow exchange. The traitor.)

Dealing with Victor before the wedding had been more than enough. But that didn’t stop Yuuri from cornering him the moment he was left unattended by his horrible best friend, already mildly drunk and blubbering all over the place. Goddamn it. Why was everyone he knew a _moron?_

Yuuri flops into the seat beside him, previously occupied by Beka, with a goofy, far too happy smile on his face. Yuri can’t imagine ever looking that stupid or being that happy. But, well, today was a good day all in all.

“What’re you doing hiding over here by yourself? Hm?”

Yuri bristled. “I wasn’t hiding, and I wasn’t by myself—Beka’s just wandered off to get drinks and Mila was here a minute ago but you know her, she gets distracted by shiny things and pretty boys. Sort of like your _husband._ ”

Yuuri didn’t seem to hear anything else he said aside from referring to Victor as his husband, which brought upon an even goofier smile on his face. “’s good. I’m so happy, Yurio. I never thought I could be this happy or have this many people in my life who care about me.” He pauses for a moment, blinks at something off in the distance and his expressions shifts to one of childlike confusion, but only for a second. “Are you happy, Yurio?”

He huffs. “I’d be happier if you weren’t being all sappy right next to me and if Beka would hurry up and bring me another drink, but I suppose I’m not miserable.”

Suddenly a hand falls atop his own where it sits on his knee and he’s forced to look into those big eyes of Yuuri’s, his expression as serious as it can possibly be when he’s this drunk. “Yurio, I need you t’ listen to me for a second, okay? You need…You need to be happy, you gotta let people care about you and…you gotta remember that skating isn’t your whole life, okay? Other things matter. You matter. An’ I know you think things are gonna be like this forever but…they’re not, an’ you deserve to have a life afterwards.”

Yuri blinked at him once, twice, three times, considered pushing him off his chair and knew in his heart of hearts he would succeed if he tried because Yuuri was _very_ drunk. “Great. Thanks. You should write a coffee table book.”

“No, I mean it. You need to be happy. I want you to be happy, I won’t be happy unless you are—you’re family, you know that? You’re a part of my family, and I love you. So promise me you’re gonna be happy. Promise me.”

It occurred to Yuri then that someone probably should have cut Yuuri off quite a while ago, and also that he himself was _far_ too drunk for all of this talk about feelings. So he takes a deep breath, resolves not to cry and says;

“I promise.”

Yuuri beams at him like he’s the single most important person on the planet. Like Yuri hung the moon and the stars and the sun in the sky, and it’s hard not to believe him when he says he loves him, that this is their family, and that maybe, just maybe, there’s a life after skating.

“Good. ‘m proud of you. Have you seen Victor anywhere?”

“He’s dancing with Giacometti.”

“Oh no…”

“Yeah.”

 

Yuri is twenty years old and he is not going to cry on this goddamn podium, there are too many cameras pointed at him right now and he doesn’t want to see himself ugly crying on every sports network on the planet for a month.

Also the GIFS. He couldn’t stand the GIFS.

But the fact of the matter is, he might cry the second the cameras are gone, because today seems like the end of an era.

Today is the retirement of Yuuri Katsuki, the last time he would ever compete in an ISU senior competition, and Yuri had kicked his ass from here to kingdom come.

He thinks he should be happier about this than he is, but mostly he thinks he’s gotten used to having Katsudon by his side on the podium for so long, it’d feel wrong for him to not be there. He’d become a strangely comforting presence, and Yuri was struggling to picture his next competition without him.

Still, he stands there, centre of the podium, with Katsudon on one side and Beka on the other, and he should feel good about the whole thing, but he doesn’t.

When the ceremony is over, he very quietly walks toward the locker rooms.

Yuuri catches up with him more quickly than he would have liked.

“Yurio, are you alright?”

He doesn’t stop walking. “Peachy. I’m not the one who’s retiring, shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

Katsudon laughs awkwardly. “I mean, I’m sort of relieved honestly; I don’t know how much longer I could have kept up with you. But you were quiet during the ceremony…”

He turns on him so fast his head almost spins. “Of course you could have kept up, you could keep skating for another season at least! Probably two! You’re not _that_ old!” He’s not upset, he’s not. “You could have tried harder today, you could have _won,_ at least gone out with a gold!”

He’s not sure why he expects Yuuri to react badly, because he doesn’t. He smiles in that knowing way of his, and Yuri hates that he doesn’t hate that anymore. That Yuuri always seems to know everything; that he’s different from how he was when they met. The way he just _knows_ that things are going to be fine, if they just leave them alone and let them be.

“I’m almost…kind of glad that I didn’t win today.” Yuri immediately gives him a look that could kill. The older man backtracks real fast. “Not that winning wouldn’t have been great! But…well. If I wasn’t going to win today—and I sort of knew I wasn’t—then…I’m glad it’s you that I lost to. I’m proud that this is how today went, y’know?”

Everything in Yuri smarts of Victors retirement and how _proud_ he was that Yuri had broken that record of his, and maybe it matters in a way, but it also _doesn’t_ matter at all because he wasn’t _there_ after that. It didn’t matter that Yuri still saw the bastard day in and day out; it wasn’t the same after that.

And now it wouldn’t be the same with Yuuri either—and he wishes he didn’t find that thought so _crushing._

“—I’ll miss you.” He finally admits quietly. “Sharing ice with you; being on the podium with you. I’ll miss it.”

Yuuri smiles so warmly it feels like it might burn him and, “I know. I will too. C’mon, hugs are happening, there’s no way around it, just get it over with before Vitya sees us and decides he has to get in on it too.”

Yuri held on far too tight for far too long.

 

Yuri Plisetsky is twenty-two years of age and it’s a known fact of the universe that he’s shit with children. Especially very small ones.

He does alright with Sofya—the fact that she has a little bit of hero worship going for him doesn’t hurt his chances with that one—and with Beka’s little sister—who is every bit as savage and snarky as he is; it’s like they were meant to join forces to torment Otabek, it was _fate._

And that served him well enough because children were not an everyday part of his life. Sure, there were novice and junior skaters at the rink—but as a general rule, they didn’t speak to him and he didn’t speak to them in turn. It was an arrangement that Yuri appreciated immensely.

But then came Marishka.

Marishka Nikiforov-Katsuki.

She is, unquestionably, one of the most obnoxiously pretty babies he’s ever seen and he’s not just saying so because he’s obligated to as godfather—if the kid had been ugly or looked like an alien, he had been fully prepared to tell Victor and Yuuri exactly that.

But she isn’t. She’s small and pretty and has never screamed in Yuri’s presence and therefore he’s decided he likes her well enough at a distance. At least for now. When she’s older and less breakable, that’s when he’ll really shine as _Uncle Yuri._ But that day has not come, and she is still very small, sleeps very often and for long periods of time, and most importantly; she is _breakable._

So obviously he refuses to hold her.

“Yurio, it’s not that bad. You can even do it sitting down! You’ll be fine!” Katsudon has been trying to convince him that he should indeed hold the child for the past half hour—he hadn’t even meant to be here that long. He was just intending on dropping by, making sure that no one in the household was dead (Victor hadn’t been sighted yet, but Yuuri insisted he was sleeping and had not been murdered by himself or the infant) and then leave, having delivered well wishes and fulfilled his duty as godfather.

But no, Katsudon isn’t letting him leave until he _holds_ her.

Never mind that she isn’t even as large as a loaf of bread and her skull is still _squishy_ because it hasn’t fused together yet—which, what the absolute fuck was wrong with them as a species that their young were born with their _skulls_ not fused together properly?

He’d sooner jump out the window of their sixth storey apartment than hold that baby and risk dropping her or doing something else stupid. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t want to think about it.

“No, no, absolutely not.” He hissed. “She’s too small, she’ll break—what if I drop her? What if she starts crying and then forever associates me with crying and horrible baby feelings? What if--,”

Yuuri gives him a stern look. “What if she loves you unconditionally because you’re her godfather and dear uncle and you’re going to help take care of her for the rest of her life? Hm? What then?”

Somehow that sounds _worse._

Katsudon is advancing on him, oh god, and it all happens so quickly and then there’s a baby in his arms.

He goes so stock still, Marishka makes a face at him but otherwise seems content. He’s holding her about a foot away from his body like she’s a deadly weapon; a bomb ready to go off at any moment and he merely seeks to minimise damage to his personage.

Yuuri starts laughing so hard he makes Marishka fuss and himself start wheezing. Yuri would kick him were he not currently holding a _small child._

“Oh my god. Relax. Christ, Yurio what do you think is gonna happen, huh? She’s not going to shatter into a million pieces, I promise.”

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do. Look just…bring her closer to your chest and let her head rest in the crook of your elbow.” He mumbled, adjusting the baby in Yuri’s arms—who was still completely stock still. “Okay, now sit down, trust me, it’s a lot less terrifying when the furthest they can fall is your lap.”

Once he was sitting—and Marishka was clutching her entire little baby fist around just his pinkie finger, Yuri could say quite honestly that…well. Maybe this wasn’t so bad. “She’s so tiny.” He murmurs quietly, wriggling his finger in her grasp and watching her struggle to hold on tighter—determined little thing, she was. He doesn’t know what else he’d expect.

“She is. Guess you’ve never really been around babies before, huh?” Yuuri asked.

“No, Sofya was…almost in middle school by the time I met her. Yuuko’s brats were the youngest I’d been around.”

“Well you’d better get used to it, you’re going to have a lot of babysitting hours ahead of you. She’s your goddaughter after all.”

He hates how much the thought makes him smile; family turns out to be a strange, strange thing.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is one of my favourites because Yuuri and Yuri's dynamic on the show is so important to me. That's always a way to hook me into a fic: provide that good platonic Yuuri & Yuri content. Next up is what was apparently a wildcard for some: Yuuko. Because I love Yuuko and I love how much she immediately took to Yuri even when he was being a pest. Chapter will be posted on Saturday!


	8. Yuuko Nishigori

Yuri Plisetsky is fifteen and might have done something slightly stupid, but it’s too late to take it back now.

The sun hasn’t even risen properly yet and he’s lacing his skates at the Hasetsu Ice Castle, because he _can’t_ afford to lose this stupid competition Victor’s decided to put on. And for once, he was awake before anyone else, so he’d come here in the brisk morning air. Honestly, he couldn’t believe the place was unlocked.

“I thought you’d turn up sooner or later.” A voice calls from the other side of the rink—that woman, the one who was friends with Katsuki, waves at him.

In turn, he scowls back. He can’t remember her damn name now. Something with a Y.

“Guess you’re not much of a people person—my Yuuri isn’t either.” She muses, strolling around the rink over to where he is now _furiously_ attempting to lace his skates tightly, so he can get on the ice before he actually has to speak to another human being so early in the morning because he is just not up for it today. Nope, can’t do it.

But it’s too late, and she sits down on the bench beside him with that irksome friendly smile on her face.

“How are you holding up?” She asks, which leaves him stumped—it’s not like he was an idiot and was completely oblivious to the fact that this entire town was on Katsuki’s side in the competition and in everything else. Sure, his family had been nice enough—no one had been outwardly rude—but…

It was easy to tell they’d almost prefer if he’d just vanish, so things could be easier for their hometown hero. Yuri tries not to begrudge them that but does anyway.

“Why the hell would you care? I thought you and the piggy were besties or whatever.” He mutters, continuing to deal with his skates—he’s not lacing them very well. The coffee he’d nicked from the kitchen at the Katsuki household hadn’t really kicked in yet and his fingers feel uncoordinated and useless.

“That’s not very nice to say about him, but since it’s early I’ll forgive it. And we are—but that doesn’t mean I’m not concerned about you. I mean…this whole thing with Victor must have had you pretty upset for you to fly all this way by yourself. I can’t imagine flying across the world on my own when I was fifteen. It must really matter to you.”

Yuri huffs, finally looking up to his badly laced skates to the woman in question—Yuuko. Her name was Yuuko, that was it. “Of course it matters, it’s my senior debut, it has to be _perfect._ And if it’s going to be perfect then I need the old man to help me. Like he said he would.” He’s never hated himself more than when his voice wobbles on those last few words.

It’s just the tiredness, he tells himself, he doesn’t really care. He refuses to care about anything Victor goddamn Nikiforov does, because the man has broken every promise he’s ever made, and _no one_ is ever angry at him for it.

Yuri isn’t even sure if he’s mad at him for it. Mostly, he feels like he’s an unwanted pet, sent to the shelter when something nicer came along.

He doesn’t like the look on Yuuko’s face, stern and worried, like Dedushka would sometimes pull when he thought Yuri was on the verge of breaking. She looks like she’s going to say something for a moment, but changes her mind at the last second, glancing down at his skates instead.

“Fingers still cold huh? Your skates aren’t quite right, mind if I fix them?”

He squirms ever so slightly, but nods after a moment.

“I know it’s probably not easy to believe anyone here is on your side—we all love our Yuuri a lot—but…I get where you’re coming from, being so angry about the whole thing. Victor, for all that we hero worshipped him, seems a little flighty—like a bird who gets distracted by shiny things and forgets what he was meant to be doing in the first place. And our Yuuri sure seems shiny these days.” She looks up from the skates to him. “What I’m saying is, you have friends here. And we’re not all desperate to see you fail—I think, honestly, you have a good chance of winning. So just…remember that, alright?”

He nods, and pretends he has the slightest idea what to do with this information. Yuuko smiles at him, fondly and goes back to work.

His skates are laced perfectly.

 

Yuri is still fifteen and the idea of ever being in a room with Victor Nikiforov again makes him seethe with rage.

But that rage isn’t sustaining him on the way home the way it did on the flight to Japan—he’s pretzelled himself into a ball in his seat, hugging his backpack to his chest like it’s going to soothe the bitter sting of _losing_ when he _knows_ he should have won. Sure, maybe Katsudon had done better on presentation, but Yuri should have won on the technical score—he wasn’t the one who fell on his ass on the ice mid-skate.

But of course, that implies there would be any kind of fair judging involved, and instead there was Victor—who was enamoured with Katsudon and every fucking thing he did.

His phone pings as the plane is about to take off.

**_Yuuko:_ ** _dont be so hard on yourself!!! your skate was amazing and ur gonna do great in the grand prix!!!_

He stares at it for a moment, baffled. He wasn’t sure why he’d agreed to trade numbers with Yuuko before he’d left—she was just so…warm. Genuine. Maybe it was something important or maybe it was just him pathetically clinging onto the person who had been the kindest to him the entire time he’d been there.

There was something comforting about talking to her that he didn’t want to look at too closely just yet.

**_Me:_ ** _i still lost so it doesn’t rlly matter does it?_

The reply is almost immediate, like she knew exactly what he was going to say before he’d ever said a word.

**_Yuuko:_ ** _of course it still matters!!!!!!!!! what u did was incredible and ur gonna keep being incredible and im proud of u now and im gonna be proud of u then too!!_

He’s so fucking baffled he has no idea what to say, his fingers hovering above the keyboard on his phone for a solid two minutes before another message appears on screen.

**_Yuuko:_ ** _don’t forget to text me when you land i wanna know that you got home ok_

Yuri thinks of a million and one things he could say—he could carry on about how it didn’t matter, even if he’d skated circles around Katsudon, Victor still would have chosen him, and it didn’t matter that Victor had _promised_ him the world months before he even knew the piggy existed, that none of it mattered.

He could say how tired this had made him; how the season hadn’t even begun, and he felt burnt out on losing in every conceivable way to someone who’s sole purpose in life seemed to be snatching away things he thought were his and smiling nervously while he did it, making it near _impossible_ to blame him for it.

He could tell her to go to hell with her pity concern over him, that he didn’t need her or anyone to cheer him on, especially not someone who was probably working with the enemy anyway.

But instead he simply texts;

**_Me:_ ** _ok._

And tries to nap the entire way home to Saint Petersburg.

 

Yuri is fifteen and this year has somehow been the longest of his life, but none of it matters—not even the fact that his hands are still shaking, and he feels like he’s walking on baby deer legs—because he stands on top of the world now.

The free skate had been everything he hoped; every last inch of effort and hard work and _love_ for the people around him and what he did put into one brief moment, and for _once_ it was enough. He was enough.

He really did it.

The part people don’t really mention when it comes to skating competitions is how much time is just spent waiting around, and so he sits, and his hands shake, and he promises he isn’t going to cry again, because there’s enough footage of him crying on and by the ice to last a lifetime. None of it matters though, everything, _everything_ was worth this moment right here.

“What’d I tell you?” His head snaps up to look at Yuuko—he’d lost track of her earlier, of everyone really. Things had been so busy. Somehow so much more chaotic than any competition he’d been at before; is this what competing would be like from now on? Soul crushingly wonderful? Like an ache in his bones that told him he had _finally_ done enough and deserved something.

“Eh?”

“I knew you could do it!”

He recoils ever so slightly. “You don’t have to scream, I’m right here.”

“How are you _not_ screaming?” Yuuko asks, dropping into the seat beside him. There were no cameras here, no one looking for him—as magical as the whole thing had been, the noise, the constant flow of people wanting to ask him every question under the sun about his victory, had been a little overwhelming. “You did incredible! You’re going to win! You…I can’t even find the words, I’m so proud of you, you were amazing out there.”

Yuri wishes those words didn’t make his whole chest feel warm—like the verbal equivalent of a _really_ good hug. “I…yeah. I did pretty great, huh?”

She beams at him so brightly it rivals the sun, bumps their shoulders together. “You did! I’m sorry I haven’t really got any profound words of wisdom here, I just wanted to let you know how proud I was. The triplets already called, told me they were very impressed by how much your presentation scores have gone up and _insisted_ I tell you that. Everyone was blown away.”

He pulls a face. “My presentation scores have always been excellent, those _brats…”_

“Yuri. Don’t lie. They’ve got statistics. I’m told there was a powerpoint presentation highlighting all the strengths and weaknesses of the skaters today to show before the viewing party in Hasetsu.”

“Jesus Christ, Yuuko, what the hell is going on with those kids of yours?” It’d be impressive if it wasn’t so strangely mildly threatening to Yuri personally.

“I think it’s a good thing they’ve got a hobby.”

 “…A hobby. Yeah. Let’s call it that and not an obsession. That’s fine.” But the smile on his face was just a tad too apparent in his voice, even as he kept his head down, and he knew she could tell—she could always tell.

“Yeah, yeah, you like ‘em more than you let on.” She paused, smile still on her face, softer now. “Quick question: we in a hugging place yet? Like is that a thing we can do?”

Yuri paused, momentarily panicked. “I’ll allow it just this once. And you will never tell anyone of this.”

“The whole world saw you weeping on the ice, but this would be too much?” She asked, squeezing an arm around his shoulders. They stayed like that for a while, quiet; this he could manage. Something a lot less alarming than Katsudon’s terrifying hunt for affection after skating.

“Holy shit,” Yuuko mumbled after a moment. “You blew Victor’s record out of the water.”

Yuri grinned, ear to ear like the Cheshire cat. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

“Hell yeah you did. Also, in future maybe try and avoid being kidnapped by your competitors?”

“ _One time.”_

**_Me:_ ** _hi my names yuri plisetsky and my fucking career is over before i can legally drink._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _its not that bad._

But the fact of the matter was: it _was_ that bad. It was fucking horrendous. It was every fear he’d been too stupidly cocky to realise he had come to fruition. He had peaked at the ripe old age of fifteen and it was only downhill from here. Where else could he go, after winning the Grand Prix and breaking Victor’s record in his debut? He’d gone and set the bar so ludicrously high for himself and now…

Well, now all he seemed to be doing was falling. Usually because he tripped over his own feet, or because he couldn’t figure out where his centre of gravity was anymore, and his balance was _shit_ and—

**_Yuuko:_ ** _I know you’re thinking otherwise rn but it is not that bad._

He scowled at his phone like she’d manifested herself through the screen and _bit_ him. It was bad enough he was hiding in the locker rooms texting her when he should be out there practicing all the jumps he couldn’t really land anymore, how dare she have the nerve to tell him that it wasn’t that bad?

It was the end of his career as he knew it!

**_Yuuko:_ ** _listen to me brat, this is important._

**_Me:_ ** _technically I cant listen to a thing you say bc we’re texting._

Alright that was petty and childish and definitely not helping his case here but lord almighty he was trying so goddamn hard right now and nothing seemed to be helping.

**_Yuuko:_ ** _ha ha. very funny._

**_Me:_ ** _I certainly thought so._

Still, he sighed and waited for the fable-esque life lesson he was undoubtedly about to receive, because that’s what Yuuko was good at. Well, aside from inexplicably making him feel less terrible when the sky was falling—and it fell often, in Yuri’s life. There was _always_ something.

**_Yuuko:_ ** _well then read very carefully bc this matters ok._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _ive got sources (the triplets obvs) on this._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _every skater in ur bracket rn had a dip in their scores when they had a growth spurt in their teens. all of them. even victor. every single one of them had issues when they started growing and their scores dropped for a while._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _but u know what happened next?_

**_Yuuko:_ ** _they got better. bc this isn’t the end of the world and ur not dying, ur body is just changing and u have to readjust._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _this isn’t the sky falling yuri, its just u stumbling a lil bit while u figure everything out. and u will figure it out. it’s just gonna take some time and some practice ok???? so stop freaking out. ur gonna be ok._

And just like that, inexplicably, he feels a whole lot better about the whole thing. Goddamn it. She’s like some kind of good fairy or something. He wants to be mad about it, but…well. Yuuko usually knows best, and he _knows_ she’s right about this; it happens to everyone. Even the best.

Even to him.

**_Me:_ ** _maybe youre right._

**_Yuuko:_ ** _just maybe? u wound me tiger._

Yuri Plisetsky is seventeen years old when he finds out nothing is ever going to feel as good as Olympic gold. Nothing.

Well, except maybe winning Olympic gold when he’s old enough to go to the after party. Beka and Mila had both offered to stay with him, but he’d told them both to kindly fuck off and enjoy the after parties—he was tired anyway.

Which hadn’t been a lie. He was fucking exhausted; that gold had taken more out of him than any medal before it. But it had been worth it to hear himself declared _Olympic Gold Medallist, Yuri Plisetsky._ That was worth everything.

There’d already been a phone call to Dedushka—who had been watching every minute of coverage from home (he’d cursed out his doctor for fifteen whole minutes when he’d said there was absolutely no way he could fly out to watch the competition himself, didn’t that man know his grandson was going to win Olympic gold?) and no one had been more certain of his victory than Dedushka. No one. Not even Yuri himself—who had been more frightened before this skate than he had before almost any skate before.

But it didn’t matter now; he’d won.

And then his phone lights up again for the first time in about an hour; after the skate and the medal ceremony there had been calls and texts and twitter notifications for miles, everyone in the world had wanted to wish him well, congratulate him or assure him that he was entirely unworthy and shouldn’t have won in the first place.

Thankfully, he didn’t really give a fuck about those people anymore.

“Privet?”

“ _Yuri! You won! I can’t believe you won—well I mean I can, we were all watching your skate, and after you landed that combination spin there was no way anyone else was gonna win, but…the Olympics, Yuri! I can’t even imagine.”_

There was a pause as Yuuko went to catch her breath, as everything she’d said thus far had come out in one very long exhale, words mashed together as her train of thought went off the tracks and through a few fences.

“Hi Yuuko.”

_“Hi Yuri. How are you?”_

“Exhausted. I can’t feel my feet—except when I can and they _hurt._ I’m scared to look too closely at them.”

_“Well you’re gonna have to look at some point. But not right now! How are you feeling about your win?”_

“Uh, fucking fantastic? Like I earned it? Like I deserved it after all those shitty skates last year.”

_“Good. You did deserve it.”_

He smiled and tried not to think too hard on the thought. He knew he’d deserved it—he knew, but there was something undeniably wonderful about hearing someone else say it. Hearing someone else think that he was enough and that he had every right to win this medal. That he was _worth it._

“I know.”

_“Of course you do, brat. Are you going out to celebrate?”_

“No, drinking age here is nineteen. No dice. Beka and Milaya were gonna stick around and keep me company but I told them to go out. Beka said we’d go out for breakfast tomorrow to celebrate.”

_“Look at you, being a caring friend and letting them go and get wasted without you. I’m so proud, my little Yuri all grown up.”_

“Yeah, yeah, speaking of, I don’t know where _your_ Yuuri is anyway. I think he and Victor went out with Giacommetti.”

“ _Oooh. So I should be expecting some scandalous photos to surface sometime tomorrow? And besides, you’re both my Yuri’s. I can have more than one.”_

“God I hope not; that _once_ was enough. Never again do I need to see so much of _any_ of them.”

_“I thought it was kinda funny.”_

“It was traumatising beyond words.”

He could hear Yuuko trying not to laugh at him, and for once there was no urge to yell. Just him rolling his eyes and not saying a word, and her knowing full well what he was doing.

“ _Can you keep a secret?”_

“Duh, of course I can.”

_“I was cheering for you both—you and Yuuri, but if I’m being honest I was cheering for you just a tiny bit more.”_

He felt his chest twist and his cheeks go hot, his free hand tightening in the quilt on the bed. “You don’t mean that.” He mumbles.

“ _Of course I do, are you calling me a liar, Plisetsky? But Yuuri can never know! It’s a secret of the utmost importance.”_

Yuri pretends he isn’t smiling so much his cheeks hurt a little. “What? That I’m the favourite now?”

“ _Shhh, he’ll hear you somehow and I’ll never hear the end of it. But I’m glad you won. I think…after last year, you deserved a big win. And you worked so hard—I’ve still got all those training videos you sent me, and now that you’ve performed the routine they’re going online. You’ve got no idea the lengths I went to in order to keep the triplets away from them!”_

“Your children are conniving little gremlins, I’ll give them that. They’ve definitely got a future in being skating bookies.”

_“They really do, don’t they?”_

He hears her smile through the phone, hears the same pride in her voice when she speaks about the triplets as she gets when she talks about him—and he can’t help but wonder for a moment, a fleeting moment, if this is what having a mother is supposed to be like.

Of course, he can never tell Yuuko, or anyone that, but it’s nice to think about. He wonders if those kids know how lucky they are, growing up with a mother who’ll support them so fiercely—who’s going to be there their whole lives long. Must be nice.

_“Hey, kid?”_

“You know I’m almost of legal drinking age, right?”

_“You’re still a kid. You’re always gonna be a kid.”_

“I am not!”

_“Of course you are, point is…I’m proud of you and I love you alright? No matter what anyone says about you on those blogs or about your skate or about anything else, you deserved this win and everyone who knows you is proud of you and knows how much you deserved it. Got it?”_

“I…yeah. Got it.”

_“Good. Now I gotta go put the kids to bed, but try to have some fun before you go home, alright? Make that nice  boy buy you something fancy for breakfast, and tell everyone I say hi.”_

“Yes ma’am.”

_“Thattaboy.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I for one feel like Yuuko is greatly under appreciated in fics, she's literally the funniest. Also her decision to just adopt this wily teenager? Amazing. Next up we have Lilia, which will be posted on Wednesday, and then chapter ten!


	9. Lilia Baranovskaya

Yuri Plisetsky is fifteen years old and decides immediately that carrying moving boxes is beneath him as a professional athlete and that he already misses his cat. The idea of living somewhere without Potya is beyond terrifying.

“Keep moving!” Yakov mutters gruffly, trying to shove past Yuri carrying two boxes filled to the brim with his things.

One never quite realises how much they own until they have to pack it all up and move. And it seemed Yuri had more clothes than he’d ever know what to do with; and still somehow, the relatively few boxes made him think about home more than ever. Dedushka’s house was so _lived in,_ it was impossible to imagine him moving. Everything had a place there, and there was little differentiating the junk from the treasures; it was not the kind of place one moved out of. It was like his Dedushka’s soul resided happily in that house, along with the lingering spirit of his grandmother; the spirit of his childhood and all his memories. He was so _tied_ to that place.

But Yuri was starting to think he’d chosen a life where he’d never be truly tied to any one place or any person.

Lilia Baranovskaya’s apartment was immaculate and full of beautiful things but did not contain one ounce of the _lived in_ feeling that made his grandfather’s house so homely. There were plaques on the walls and trophies in glass cases, a ballet studio in the centre of the damn apartment. The place was a cold love letter to ballet, to Lilia’s career, to everything she’d ever been passionate about.

And still somehow, it was cold.

But then again, Lilia was a cold person.

She’d stood back while Yuri and Yakov had carried up the boxes of his things—he’d been told several days ago now that there was absolutely no way he was bringing his cat to live in her home, and so Potya had been sent to stay with Dedushka, and Yuri had pretended not to cry about it. He wasn’t a child anymore, he didn’t need some _cat_ to keep him company.

(except for the part where he did, and being apart from Potya felt so unbelievably wrong he couldn’t find the words to explain the feeling to anyone, so he’d stopped trying—who would he tell?)

“There. These are the last of them.” Yakov said, his gruff voice snapping Yuri out of any thoughts he might have had about a more welcoming home. He sets the boxes down in the corner of what had previously been Lilia’s guest bedroom with all the others, and nods at his student. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

Not for the first time he wonders what the fuck happened between those two that left them like _this,_ and what the hell was going on in Yakov’s mind that made him think abandoning Yuri with his ex-wife was a good training regime.

“I don’t need luck.” He replies, and watches as Yakov’s mouth twitches in something that might’ve been a smile on someone else.

He nods, turns and leaves him to unpack.

Unpacking is something of a novelty, he supposes. He’s never unpacked at a competition before; he’s not the sort of person who takes his clothes out and hangs them up in the wardrobe of his hotel room. Everything gets dragged out of his suitcase as he needs it, and thrown back into it, balled up, when it’s time to leave. Maybe not the best plan—especially when he ended up having to sit on his suitcase to squish it enough to zip it up—but it hadn’t failed him yet.

Somehow, he figured that just wasn’t going to cut it in Lilia’s home. Even if he had no idea how long he was meant to be here; conveniently that part had been left out. Only that he was to live and train here, and that Lilia was going to work him to the bone until he was every bit the champion she saw fit to mould him into.

He starts unpacking haphazardly—leaving half empty boxes all over the room and half unpacked possessions all over the bed as he tries to figure out some sort of system here, how this is meant to work. Should he try and make himself at home? Or should he be ready for the day Lilia told him to leave?

Was he really prepared for what living with Lilia would entail? Was she prepared for what living with _him_ would entail?

A sharp knock on his bedroom door startles him as he attempts to figure out where to put his box of medals. The door opens after a pause without his prompting.

“Dinner is in five minutes please wash up—what on earth have you done to this room, child?” How exactly Lilia always _sounds_ like she’s frowning is completely beyond him, but she succeeds at it.

“I’m unpacking.” He answers bluntly, blinking up at her. She blinks back at him in turn, baffled at the response apparently.

Maybe neither of them were very ready for how exactly this was going to go.

“—You can tidy it up after dinner. Come.”

He’s marched to the dining room—which like most of the apartment does not look like it’s ever actually been used. Yuri still finds it difficult to imagine that someone lives here; that anyone has ever lived here.

Lilia sits at the head of the table with her perfect posture, her hair and makeup still immaculate. If he’s being honest, the whole thing is sort of bizarre. Even worse, she looks like she’s ready to make one of her speeches—the kind that strikes fear into the heart of grown men, and to a lesser degree, in Yuri.

“Sit.”

He sits.

“I’m not going to pretend this is going to be easy or that this arrangement is ideal for both our comfort zones—but I’ve agreed to train you and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I do not train mediocre dancers or skaters, and therefore I expect you to become a champion under my tutelage. You will receive no creature comforts here, for you haven’t earned them yet. Breakfast is at six, sharp every morning, afterwards we will train in the studio until it is time for you to go to the rink for Yakov’s training. You will abstain from coffee, sugars or anything outside of the dietary plan outlined for you. Dinner is at seven. You will go to sleep at a reasonable time and rise well rested for my lessons—and you will keep the apartment clean. I don’t care that it’s your space, it is part of my home and you will keep it neat and tidy. Understood?”

He blinks at her. He thinks he might have joined boot camp without realising. “And Potya?”

“What is _Potya?”_

“My cat.”

“You’ve earned no creature comforts here, Yuri. Literal or otherwise. Not yet anyway.”

They eat in silence.

The worst part of it is, it’s really not all that bad living with Lilia—in fact, it’s rather like living alone. She doesn’t hound him about his behaviour or tidying up or anything else. She _expects_ him to comply completely, and he does. Because winning the Grand Prix is, apparently, more important to him than the right to leave his laundry all over his room in piles like an ordinary teenager.

In fact, it’s almost three weeks before they have a conversation more than basic pleasantries or related to his skating.

It’s about _The Notebook_ of all things.

“This American nonsense is _drivel._ What kind of woman wants a man like that? He is obnoxious, and she is weak willed for giving into his childish inability to accept no as an answer.” As it turns out, Lilia Baranovskaya is a scathing critic of all manner of things, not simply dancing, skating and Yuri as a person. No, trash romance films will not escape her brutal, cutting assessments. Nothing will.

“It’s bullshit for bored housewives.” Yuri mutters, looking up from his phone. “I don’t know why you’re watching it.”

“Supposedly it’s very famous, my mistake for thinking fame would have anything to do with the quality of the product.” She sneers but doesn’t make any move to change the channel.

After a while, Yuri is even offered one small handful of the popcorn she’s eating—which might have been the strangest thing about this place, the fact that there was nothing but health food anywhere, except for the popcorn (“It’s air popped, healthier.”)

“It’s kinda sad I guess.” He comments, watching the older obnoxious man and the older weak-willed woman on their deathbeds—somehow he’d gotten invested after a particularly scathing comment from Lilia about the plot, and had put his phone down, ending up hugging his knees to his chest as he stared at the television.

“Death is always sad, it does not make the film _good._ No wonder the American’s brains are rotting, if this is what they consider quality cinema.”

And well, if he noticed Lilia’s eyes shining at the very end, he wasn’t going to tell anyone anyway.

Because who would believe him, and really, he wasn’t naïve enough to think she wouldn’t murder him for it anyway.

(it takes almost six months; but eventually, a GPF gold medal in hand, Lilia relents, and Yuri moves Potya into the apartment gleefully. Lilia says she doesn’t like animals, but he catches Potya purring on her lap receiving pets more than once).

 

Yuri is almost seventeen and is getting really fucking tired of tripping over his own damn feet like he has been for the last few months.

He’d always hated being so short—it just gave everyone more excuse to comment on how young he was and coo _Yurochka_ at him in the most condescending way possible. But Yuri was quite used to being short—and even when he was rather suddenly no longer short, he certainly wasn’t used to being tall.

The music stopped before he could even finish the routine.

“Stop. This is pitiful.” It’s not the first time he’s heard those words from Lilia and it certainly won’t be the last. By now, he’s heard it so many times it’s lost most of its sting. Most of it.

He stops, freezes, falls out of position and waits for her to say something.

“You still dance like you have the centre of balance you did when you were _this_ tall,” First of all, he had never been that short, not since he was about seven, “when you should have adjusted it accordingly. I will show you.”

It’s still early morning and the studio is cold—it’s always cold in a way—but Yuri is achingly aware that soon, on any other day, he’d be preparing to go to the rink for skating practice. But Yakov had barred him from it—said today he needed to stay with Lilia and work on ballet, work on his balance, before he ended up breaking something trying to land a jump on the ice.

(it was bizarre, how much he didn’t realise he missed the sounds of blades striking ice until he had been banned from going anywhere near the rink)

She struts over, posture as perfect as he’s ever seen, and places her hand at the small of his back. “The problem is that you refuse to accept your centre of balance is here now, you still move as if it was _lower._ It isn’t—your centre of gravity is no longer as close to the ground; this will make everything _harder._ But it is your reality now. You need to think of the base of your spine—where it meets your hips—this is your anchoring point now. Try again.”

It takes maybe half a second longer, but he still stumbles, still trips over his own feet, still can’t keep his damn balance. It’s not even nine and Yuri is already ready to go back to bed, call quits on today. Maybe cuddle Potya for a while if she’d have him.

But Lilia is staring him down like he’s just insulted her mother and he feels like maybe he should fear for his life.

“Do you know why I agreed to train you?” She asks after a long moment of that horrific stare.

“—because Yakov asked you to?” He answers with a shrug. Yuri knew she was getting at something deeper, but he’s tired and aches all over and is so _frustrated_ he can’t think straight.

“I agreed to train you because I train champions, Yuri Plisetsky, and in you I saw a potential champion.” She states simply, crossing her arms in front of her chest. Everything Lilia said, she said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world—and that anyone listening was simply a _moron_ for not knowing it already.

She quirks a single thin eyebrow at him, as if daring him to make some snarky comment. But he knows better.

“When you won the Grand Prix against that boy that stole Vitya, I felt assured in my decision—that you had the capabilities to be a champion. And you do.” She went on. “Not that anyone would know it looking at you now—it’s pathetic. You’re giving up. Something isn’t working and you’re just giving up like a quitter.”

“I am not!” The second he said it, he knew maybe she was at least a little bit right and boy oh boy did he _hate_ himself for it.

“You are. You are giving up on yourself because you have proven yourself now and you think that is enough—but it will never be enough. You must keep going. You must always be better, you must continue to conquer what is put in front of you. You have the ability to be a champion, and you are squandering it like the child you claim you are not. I did not agree to train you because I thought you would give up.”

He puffed out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, screwed up his face in a manner that was decidedly childlike and returned to starting position.

“What now child?”

“ _Again._ And don’t call me child.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, I’m going again, and I’m going to keep going until I can do this in my sleep even with my shitty balance and this stupid goddamn growth spurt and do _not_ call me child.”

Lilia gave him an appraising look—like she was deciding if he was worth her time, her effort, her life.

“Better. Again, from the top.”

(it takes thirty-seven tries before he gets through the whole routine without stumbling or tripping; but by god, does he do it.)

 

Yuri is eighteen years old and not for the first time, he feels slightly abandoned.

“You’re going to choreograph your own free skate, I will simply help you fine tune the technical aspects.”

In theory, this was everything Yuri had ever wanted—to be completely in control of his skating. To not have Victor’s or Yakov’s or Lilia’s fingerprints all over everything he did. To do something for himself for once. In practice, the idea was daunting beyond words.

Him? Choreograph an entire free skate alone?

He felt dizzy.

“You’re joking.” He finally says, squinting up at Lilia—something like this would be her idea of a joke, wouldn’t it? Watching him squirm.

Assuming of course that she had any concept of _humour_ in the first place.

“I do not _joke_ about your career, Yuri. You are an adult now; you are an Olympic champion. It is time for you to start taking a more active role in the creation of your programs.” She pauses. “I thought this is what you wanted, no? To not be controlled by anyone? Now you have all the freedom in the world. I expect you to have at least _something_ to show me by the end of the week.”

And she left the studio, leaving him standing there. Baffled.

It wasn’t even like he’d never choreographed for himself before; the whole world had been that exhibition skate he’d done, the entire thing choreographed in a frenzy of teenage rebellion and Redbull with the help of a budding friendship.

(Maybe he should call Otabek—he might know what to do)

But that might defeat the purpose of it, wouldn’t it? Asking everyone else for help when this was supposed to be him. Authentically him. A skate choreographed by him and for him, with nothing but technical tweaking from Lilia.

The thought made his stomach turn.

It was three days before he had even the slightest bit of choreography—not a beginning or an end, just a _something_ for the middle.

And he thinks the worst part of the whole thing is that he still _lives_ with Lilia (he’s working on it—apartment hunting during the skating season is _hard_ ), there’s no avoiding her. She has to know he’s struggling with it. But she says nothing, she sips her chamomile tea and gives him slight glances and pays him no more mind than she ever did when they weren’t working on his programs.

It’s downright maddening.

So, it’s over dinner that she finally says something about the constant eye twitch he’s had for the past few days.

“Something the matter?” Lilia asks, like she doesn’t already know.

“—nothing. Everything’s peachy.” He grits out, stabbing a piece of broccoli on his plate. God, he hates food during the season, thank god skating careers never last past thirty—the boiled vegetables and steamed chicken (and then fish, and then chicken, and then fish) is enough to drive a person out of their mind.

“How’s your choreography coming along?”

He says nothing, choosing instead to angrily chew the broccoli instead of snap at her that it’s going fine (a lie) and raise her expectations, or admit he has no idea what he’s doing (the truth) and have both his ego and her faith in him as a skater _die_ a painful death.

“—You know you would have much less trouble with it if you just trusted your instincts more, Yura.” She says in that way of hers, the one that made you feel like a dumbass for not already knowing. “You can choreograph just fine; you always wanted more freedom and for good reason, you may not have come up with the skates _I_ choreographed for you, or the kind of program I would prefer for you, but you would have come up with something spectacular on your own regardless. You are over thinking the matter.”

He grumbles, stabs another piece of broccoli and doesn’t say another word.

(the program he comes up with is nothing short of _incredible_ )

 

Yuri Plisetsky is almost nineteen years old and he never thought he’d be sad to be moving out of Lilia’s apartment.

It wasn’t that the place ever really became _homey_ the way his grandfather’s house had been. But…at some point enough of his medals hung over the dresser in his bedroom, and some of his snacks had made their way into the kitchen, his appointments were written into the calendar, and he’d spent more than a few nights on the couch watching movies with Lilia and Potya and a bowl of the air-popped popcorn she liked so much.

And somewhere along the way maybe it was a little bit more like home than he wanted to admit.

“Done.” He mumbles to himself, taping up the last box of his stuff. Victor and Yuuri were coming by soon to take the boxes to his new apartment; really it wasn’t even that far away from where he now sat. But it was still…

Well. It was something.

Potya had been on edge since the packing started three days ago, and Lilia had made herself scarce—seemed more stiff than usual, leaving Yuri to feel quite alone the last few days he’d live with…well, anyone really.

 _His first real place!_ Yuuri had said, excitedly offering any and all help he could possibly need to move. Just about everyone had offered to help—hell, Beka had offered to _fly up_ and help him move, as long as he was allowed to sleep on the couch when they were done.

(he’d told him _no,_ don’t be ridiculous, come visit when the place was set up)

He remembered moving into the apartment and feeling so out of place, the first few months spent living like he was in a hotel and liable to check out any day now. Him settling in and accepting that this was where he _lived_ had been a horribly long process. Lilia being Lilia hadn’t really helped the situation, he supposed, but now he sort of appreciated that about her.

A sharp knock at the door startles him.

“Vitya and his husband are here,” Lilia says calmly from where she looms in the doorway. “Please come out to greet them before he does something stupid or otherwise destroys my home.”

Funnily enough, Yuri didn’t have to ask which of them she was talking about.

But he stops in front of Lilia without even thinking, remembering when she used to loom over him constantly, and now having to look down at her—which remained unsettling, truthfully.

“I just…wanted to say thank you, for letting me live here.” He said stiffly.

“It was for you training.” She counters.

“I know, but…thank you anyway. You didn’t have to do it. No one would have expected you to and you did it anyway. So I just…wanted to say thank you. For everything.”

Lilia gave a stiff nod in return. “I suppose having you here wasn’t…dreadful.”

If he saw her eyes shine with any kind of emotion (or tears), then Yuri Plisetsky could say he had the good sense not to say a fucking word and live to see his next birthday.

He might even miss this place, he thinks.

(he invites Lilia over for dinner a week later; she looks uncharacteristically touched at the gesture, so he keeps doing it as often as he can)

 

Yuri Plisetsky is twenty-three and numbness has consumed his entire being.

He thinks it’s better this away.

Because the alternative is a world of hurt he will never fully be equipped to deal with. He doesn’t know how people just carry on after something like this; but he supposes most people have a lot more family than he ever did, it’s less of a tragedy when there’s someone else to lean on and remind you that you’re not alone in the world.

And family has always been a horribly complicated concept to him.

He’s not sure when the funeral was; the days are long, and the nights are longer and they all stretch into an endless forever in which his Dedushka is _not there._

A thought that was an unfathomable as it was real—he’d always known this was going to happen, that his Dedushka would die long, long before Yuri was ready to deal with it (he would never be ready to deal with it) and that he would _hurt_ in a way he didn’t think possible. There had been so many scares over the years; his heart misbehaving, a broken hip, a cold that had turned into pneumonia—everything imaginable had gone wrong, and he’d come out of it fine. Said he was tough, like only people in Russia were, and stubborn, like only Plisetsky’s were.

But that hadn’t done a damn thing to stop him dying when Yuri was too far away to say goodbye.

He thinks it’s better this way, being numb.

He just wishes people would understand that and leave him be.

Unfortunately, the people around him seem to care far too much for that.

Lilia had let herself into the apartment uninvited—it seemed she’d waited until Otabek had left before she came in, wanting to corner him.

At least that’s what it felt like.

“Yura.” She says, and he doesn’t even want to look at her. Can already hear half of what she’s going to say bouncing around his skull and it’s not helping, nothing is helping. “Yura. Look at me.”

“No.”

“What did you say?”

“I said _no,_ Lilia. I’m not a child anymore and you can’t just demand things of me.” He replied through gritted teeth.

She sighs, deep and world weary—different from her usual attempts to let someone know they’d disappointed her. “I would say that you are hurting, and that it is alright to do so—but you’re not hurting, are you? You’re not feeling anything at all.”

He winces, keeps his eyes firmly on the dining table and not where she looms over him—he feels like a child, she’s always had that effect on him. She has it on so many people; makes them feel small and like they know so little. He hates it. He’s always hated it. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“You think you’re the first person to lose someone?”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it!”

“It’s been over a month, Yura.” He startles—a month? It can’t have been. There’s no…no, she has to be wrong. “And I do not expect you to move on; I’ve never expected that of you. This is the kind of hurt that will take years to fade, and it’s a loss you will never regain—but that’s the problem of it, my boy, you are not hurting. You’re not feeling anything at all.”

Lilia’s never been one to mince her words; she seldom treads carefully. Sometimes he appreciates that.

Not so much now.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A lie. He knows exactly what she’s talking about, knows she’s right—but how has no one considered that maybe he doesn’t _want_ to hurt? Maybe feeling nothing is better than feeling _that._ Maybe people were wrong when they said numbness was the worst thing in the world.

Clearly, whoever had said as much had never lost anyone they loved as much as he’d loved Dedushka.

“You will never feel any better if you don’t _feel_ anything; pain needs to be felt in order to go away.” She walks around the table to him, and he tries not to flinch when she gets too close. A hand light on his shoulder, but still there. “I will not lose you to this, Yuri. I simply refuse. Perhaps it is hard to see now, through all the sadness, but one day this will be the past. Just like every other bad thing will one day be the past.”

He reaches a hand up to rest atop hers.

“I don’t…I don’t want to feel it.”

“I know. But you should.”

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine Lilia and Yuri have an interesting dynamic given the living arrangements. She's not a warm person, but she cares about this terrible child in particular. Now we're finally up to the last chapter! On Saturday I'll be posting chapter ten which is, to absolutely no one's surprise, about Otabek and Yuri. It's probably one of my favourites of the whole fic, so I hope you like it, and enjoyed the fic as a whole.


	10. Otabek Altin

Yuri Plisetsky is ten years old and far too excited about his first skating training camp—not that he’s about to let anyone know that of course.

Well, except Dedushka—who was equally excited to hear Yuri was doing well; more than anything, he was excited to hear his grandson was happy.

The training camp was…strange. There were people from all over the place—mostly from around Russia, kids who had never been to Saint Petersburg before, kids who had never been to a big city for the life of them. But equally so were kids who’d come from all over the world—there had been a reason Yuri had wanted Yakov to train him after all, he was the very best of the best.

Looking back, he doesn’t remember much about those kids; he couldn’t tell anyone which ones of them had careers after that, and which had ended up retiring before they ever did a damn thing with their skills. Yakov was a make or break sort of situation; if you were good, this is where you went to find out, if you weren’t then it would become very clear very quickly that you didn’t belong.

Yuri belonged. He was better than most of them. Even the older kids. At the time this made him very smug—even years later it made him a little smug.

What he does remember is this; being praised for his form at such a young age, nameless faceless kids falling trying to land jumps they wouldn’t be ready to do for _years,_ the food being _terrible,_ and the mornings being early.

What he doesn’t remember but apparently should; a golden eyed boy of thirteen who’d flown in from Kazakhstan, dreaming of being a skater even though there were more than a few doubts.

What he does remember; feeling eyes on him the entire camp and thinking nothing of it—he was one of Yakov’s pupils after all, he was _impressive_ for his age, he had the makings of greatness.

What he doesn’t remember but wishes he did: Otabek Altin, one day Olympic Bronze medallist and his someday best friend.

He tries for years after Barcelona and cannot for the life of him remember meeting someone who’d become so very important. Otabek teases him about his poor memory, and Mila teases him for caring so much that he couldn’t remember what, by all admissions, must have been a horribly uneventful meeting from his point of view.

He has several clear memories of that camp that travel with him into adulthood—he missed Dedushka, the food wasn’t good, that one boy who had boasted he was the best of the best and fallen over the second they hit the ice—but try all he might, he did not remember meeting his best friend.

(Otabek tells the story from his perspective though, often when Yuri grumbles about not remembering; he claims he was woefully unimpressive, both as a boy and a skater, and there’s no reason why Yuri—who had the eyes of a soldier and the determination to match—would remember him above any of the other children at the training camp, but that meeting him had been unutterably important to him for quite some time.

Once he goes so far as to say that without that meeting—the one Yuri doesn’t remember for the life of him—he might never have become a skater at all, and they would never have met in Barcelona.

Yuri tells him to stop being an idiot; his career happened because Otabek is hard headed and a powerful, enthralling skater, and had nothing to do with him)

 

Yuri Plisetsky is fifteen years old and struggling to catch his breath, ready to melt into the ice he’s lying on—it feels so _good_ against his sweating skin. He has to stop himself from bubbling with laughter as he lies there, middle of the rink surrounded by screaming crowds.

It takes a minute for him to clamber to his feet again; skate toward the exit where he can already see Otabek waiting for him and (thankfully) not his coaches.

Good. He doesn’t want to deal with them just yet. Them or the harsh reality of what horrible punishment would be inflicted upon him for deviating so heavily from the plan. So he doesn’t think about it at all. He skates towards Otabek, grin on his face and flings his arms around the older boy the moment he’s close enough.

They stumble, almost into a reporter who clearly was dying for Yuri to mess up and come off a wreck. They always want him to be a wreck more than they ever wanted him to win; his meltdowns get them more views, sell more papers, than his victories do. He tries not to care about how invested the world is in him failing.

Mostly because he hadn’t failed this time.

“Easy, Yuri.” Otabek huffed at him, but there wasn’t even a hint of scolding in his voice, just fond amusement.

“I did it—we did it!”

The rush of exhilaration was oddly breathtaking—Yuri had never much cared for exhibition skates before. They were a formality more than anything; like the medal ceremony. They didn’t _mean_ anything really.

But he’d never gotten to perform something he choreographed before—exhibition skates were tiresome because they tended to be Yakov wanting to show off what he thought were Yuri’s best traits as a skater.

His occasionally bad attitude oddly enough had never made the list.

“ _You_ did it.” There’s something unfathomably warm in Otabek’s eyes—fondness, pride even—and maybe all of a sudden Yuri is so aware why everyone’s always harping on about friendship.

He makes a decision then and there.

“Well now we’re going to have to stay friends, those are the rules.” He states, finally taking a step back from the embrace and trying to look _very_ serious about the matter.

Otabek just looks horribly amused by it, like he’s trying not to grin. “And why’s that?”

“Because that was the most myself I’ve ever felt, and you helped me make it. We have to stay friends.”

He manages to render Otabek speechless—not that he ever seemed to be a chatty sort of guy, but usually, that was a matter of _choice_ rather than being bamboozled by something said to him. It’s quiet for a moment, and he thinks he might have said the wrong thing until the look on the older boy’s face softens. He nods.

“I guess we do. Those are the rules after all.”

 

Yuri is seventeen and for the first time in a long time, is nervous about a competition. So nervous in fact, he finds himself unable to sleep. He keeps telling himself this competition should be like every other competition, and therefore he shouldn’t be so worried.

But every other competition wasn’t the Olympics.

Wasn’t his _first_ Olympics.

In which Russia and every athlete from Russia was already being put under a microscope.

And the entire world, not just the skating world, was going to be watching. If he fucked up here, the whole planet was going to see, and it was going to be reported about in about forty countries.

Obviously, he’d done the only reasonable thing he could (given that he was under strict rules to not go near the rink unless it was a scheduled practice time), he went to Beka’s room.

Beka, who opened the door on the second knock like he’d been expecting Yuri to show up at any moment even though it had to be after midnight already.

“You should be resting.” Otabek says, guiding him into the room and letting him sit cross-legged on the unused bed in the room—he’d lucked out on not getting a roommate, but the Kazakhstan team was smaller than the Russian team.

“I can’t sleep.” _I’m nervous about tomorrow._

He didn’t have to say it, Beka knew. Sighing quietly, he sits down on his own bed and glances over at his friend. “Tomorrow will go just as well as any other competition: which means there’s no way of knowing. It might be a complete disaster.”

“Gee thanks.”

“But…you’re you. So, I have no doubts you’ll pull some ridiculous performance out of your hat and we’ll all be left in the dust behind your ridiculously high score. It’s going to be fine. There’s not a reality out there where you won’t make podium tomorrow.”

Yuri gnawed on his bottom lip. “I know. I know it’s just a competition—even if it’s… _the Olympics._ It’s just. If I screw up a jump tomorrow, it’s going to be replayed on every news station on the planet.”

Otabek snorted. He looked tired, but peaceful—he always looked peaceful. “Yes, yes it will. But when someone _else_ inevitably screws up a jump _worse_ than you did, they’ll probably play that clip a whole lot more.”

“Huh. That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Better than how you were looking at it.”

He threw a pillow across the room at him.

Come morning he won’t really remember what they talked about after that, or even how much longer he was awake. But he did remember waking up on the spare bed in Otabek’s room when his phone alarm went off—his phone which seemed to be an endless stream of people asking where he’d gone, why he wasn’t in his room and one particularly notable one from Yakov telling him he’d shave Yuri’s head if he’d left the country again without telling anyone.

“—Yakov’s planning on shaving me bald if I’ve gotten on a plane without telling him.” He mused at the sleepy lump that otherwise known as Otabek.

“You do have a history of doing that. ‘s alarming. Especially when you were so tiny.”

“Once. I did it _once._ Also fuck you.”

“Mmhmm. Did you sleep alright?”

He blinked. “Yeah, actually.”

“Good. Now there’s no excuse for you falling on your ass on international broadcast.”

( as it turns out, he wouldn’t fall on his ass on international broadcast at the Olympics—everything goes off without a hitch.

And when he’s standing on the podium with a gold medal a comforting weight around his neck, he seems to be the only person in the world not surprised Otabek stands on his left with a bronze around his.

They’ll ask him later about what he thinks of the so called ‘dark horse’ of the competition, and he’ll say with no uncertainty that anyone who still thinks Otabek is a dark horse hasn’t been paying attention.)

 

Yuri is nineteen and eternally glad that the flight to Almaty is only five hours because he’s already spent more time crammed into an airplane seat than anyone should in a whole lifetime.

It’s far from the first time he’s made this flight, and somehow, he very much doubts it’ll be the last—but it isn’t for a competition or a weekend this time. This time is a full fortnight in Almaty with his best friend; no training to think of, and no meal plan to ruin all his fun.

Even if he has to sleep on Otabek’s couch for a while.

He lands just late enough that he couldn’t sleep through the flight, and immediately wants to fall asleep in the taxi Beka had gotten for them (as impractical as he knew it was to have luggage on the bike, Yuri couldn’t deny he was disappointed they couldn’t take it instead).

“Planes are evil.” He bemoaned, trying to bury himself in the hood of his jacket.

Otabek just snorts at him. “And you’re a much better flier than I am—imagine how much I hate it.”

He sighed, peering around his hood at the person beside him. “Worth it though. Or it better be—I left Potya at the mercy of the Hag for this.” But every word was said with an obnoxious smile he wasn’t sure he’d ever thought possible of himself.

“Oh, of course, there’s no disappointing the great Yuri Plisetsky.” He replied with mock seriousness, clearly trying not to smile smugly at him. Yuri found he didn’t much care.

Almaty was beautiful during the summer. More beautiful when the sun was rising—even if he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed to see it—and Yuri was on the back of a motorcycle, driving along the foothills that surrounded the city, his cheek pressed between Otabek’s shoulder blades.

“Maybe I’m glad you dragged me out of bed.” He’d admit a little later, when they stopped to watch the sun rise over the city.

Otabek simply replied; “I know you are.”

“How often do you do this? Come up here to watch?”

“Every day.” He replied almost immediately. “Every day that I can—with training, it’s hard. But during the offseason, I try and come here every day I can.”

“Then let’s keep doing that, huh? Keep dragging me out of bed for this.”

“Of course.”

The days came and went, and Yuri was dragged all over Almaty, but somehow none of it seemed tiring. All coloured with the warm light of a gloriously lazy summer.

They had dinner with the Altin family one night—Beka’s little sister, Dasha, turned out to be every bit as much a little hellion as Yuri was, they exchanged numbers so she could keep him posted on all the ridiculous things her brother did but wouldn’t tell him about and promised a number of embarrassing photos.

Otabek looked like his life was flashing before his eyes—claimed that he regretted every choice that had led him to the moment of them meeting.

Mrs. Altin was kind and warm and fed Yuri until he couldn’t move—it made sense now, that Otabek could be so warm and so patient, with a mother like her. He wanted to be jealous but couldn’t—they all too well deserved each other and all the happiness there for Yuri to even try to feel bitter or envious.

They went to the rink where Otabek trained—open to the public of course and skated around for a while wowing the ordinary people skating in circles and wobbling the entire way. Someone asked how Yuri got to be so good at skating, and he told them he was the world champion in men’s skating. The man had laughed like he’d told a joke. Yuri had let him.

They went to _three_ of Otabek’s club nights, despite all his hesitation of allowing Yuri unsupervised for an hour inside a nightclub. But Yuri had _insisted,_ after all, he’d gone shopping for new clothes for exactly this purpose, and Otabek’s _other_ friends would be there. The ones who knew almost nothing about Beka’s skating and didn’t really care about it.

Yuri couldn’t think of anyone he knew who had nothing to do with skating.

They were all easy-going people, who for the life of them couldn’t figure out how skating was scored who, upon seeing him walk in with Otabek said;

“So, you’re Beks’ Yura, huh?” And offered him a drink.

It was just that easy.

They all sat crammed in a booth—six of them in total—until Beka’s set as DJ, an endless supply of drinks that kept earning Yuri concerned, if somewhat judgemental looks when he accepted them. There was no way in hell Yuri could go to another country and allow himself to be outdrunk—his national pride would take more of a beating than it could handle.

“So, you’re like…a really good skater, right? Better than Beks here?” A tall blonde named Alexey asked him.

“I’m the best.” Yuri replied without even having to think about it, downing another shot of…something. It stopped tasting like anything quite a while ago and he’d stopped caring.

“’cause the lot of us, we know fuck all about skating—but they let this moron go overseas to represent the whole country, so y’know, I’ve gotta ask: is he any good?”

A horrible, wholly undignified bordering on ugly snort rips out of him before he can stop it, and then the laughing doesn’t stop and Otabek definitely jams an elbow in his side on purpose, but he can’t help it. “I guess he’s alright. After all, he skates against _me.”_

Alexey deems this good enough and asks if people really wear shorts when it snows in Saint Petersburg. Yuri is well and truly plastered by the time Otabek leaves to go get ready for his set, and Yuri complains at the sudden loss of warmth pressed against his side.

The others—Alina, Anuar and Roman—wander off at some point in search of drinks or dancing and Yuri is left with just Alexey for a moment.

“’s good you’re here, y’know? Beks’ always talking about you, but we never saw you, I was starting to think he made you up—or at least made up knowing you. There was some googling done—what kind of teenager has their own Wikipedia page anyway?”

Yuri snorted. “Me, I guess.”

“Mm. I think he was trying to keep you away from us—like he wanted it all to be separate. Barely mentions the skating when he’s with us. I swear, if we hadn’t been watching at his mum’s place, I don’t think we would’ve known he’d placed in the bloody Olympics. Tight lipped bastard.” Alexey mused, taking another sip of whatever horrible beer he’d ordered for himself.

Yuri did _not_ do beer.

“He’s never been much of a bragger. Too humble.”

“Something like that.”

The set was incredible—but Yuri already knew Beka’s music was amazing. He was the first person who got sent most of his new mixes, and he loved each and every one of them. Including the stupid memey ones Otabek made that he knew would never see the light of day.

Yuri dances until his feet hurt, and with sweat dripping down his body, making his clothes stick to his skin, thinks that this is a thousand times better than dancing to the same songs playing off his laptop in his living room at home.

It’s not until he’s at the airport again, hugging Otabek goodbye—for a moment hating that he’s taller than him now, but relishing the way the hug still envelops him completely—that he thinks about what a rich, rich life he has here that has nothing to do with competition, nothing to do with the next gold medal and the next program to be choreographed.

He boards the plane with an ache in his chest that he isn’t sure ever really goes away.

 

He’s twenty-one and his ankle is fucking killing him.

Inevitably, Yuri knew this was going to happen at some point. His career had, thus far, seldom been marred by any kind of serious injury. A couple of pretty severe bruises, a concussion or two, but nothing major. And he supposed really, in comparison to what he’s seen happen to other skaters, this isn’t major.

But it’s major enough that he’s barred from practice for _three whole weeks._

The most he’s allowed to do is some stretches and it’s downright maddening.

So, left on his own with no supervision and no one to tell him not to, he books the tickets without a word. He’s an adult after all and Yakov isn’t his damn keeper.

(a lie)

Paris has always been a beautiful city; it seems like an old-world city possessed by the new world, gothic buildings hundreds of years old containing accountants offices and a grocery store, people just _living_ and working alongside some of the world’s greatest monuments.

In a way, it reminds him of Saint Petersburg, and so he’s more fond of it than perhaps he should be.

But he’d spent so much time in cities all across the world, the concept of homesickness had faded; he had a home on almost every continent on the planet. But he thinks Paris might be one of his favourites.

He hadn’t been assigned to Internationaux de France in quite a while, and never really cared either way—but he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t always slightly disappointing when his and Otabek’s competitions didn’t align. Between the season and training before the season, and every other hurdle life seemed to throw at them both, there was never as much time as either would like for visiting.

As such, Yuri had to seize opportunities when they presented themselves.

He hadn’t told Otabek he was coming—he hadn’t said a word. He’d just turned up on competition day and fought a French woman for one of the better seats—a fight he’d won, thank you very much, he knew everything about him visually might scream idiot foreigner, and maybe in France he was, but not in a skating rink.

No, in the rink he was a local.

So he sits down, gets comfy and watches as the crowd files in. When finally, the skaters enter the arena, waiting for their turn to hit the ice, he sends a text message.

_Look to your right. Third row._

There’s something undeniably hilarious about the many, _many_ emotions that play over Beka’s face when he spots Yuri sitting amongst the crowd like he himself wasn’t due very soon to be competing in the same league—he could be anyone.

Come to think of it, it was something of a miracle no one here of all places had recognised him, but he was _trying_ to keep a low profile.

He looks stunned, then confused, then mildly annoyed at not being informed before finally settling on something between fond and profoundly touched. Yuri feels a pleasant warmth in his chest as he sends another message.

_I didn’t come all this way to see you lose._

And he doesn’t.

Sometimes he forgets, always being on the ice, how much he had loved watching skaters when he was young—he still, of course, remembers that first Rostelecom when he’d seen Victor skate for the first time in person.

He remembers also, the first time he really paid attention to Otabek Altin as a skater. It was true what they said; he seemingly came out of nowhere, a _powerful_ skater with almost inhuman amounts of air time, not a drop of natural talent in him, but a lot of grit, determination and stubbornness.

Yuri liked him better for that fact.

Otabek wins gold.

(Leo de la Iglesia wins silver, and JJ, unfortunately, wins bronze)

He can’t remember the last time he was so excited to see someone else win—especially when he himself had been banned from the rink, however temporarily. But excitement and _pride_ well up in his chest as the scores come back—it doesn’t matter, anyone who watched knows Otabek was going to win, the second his skate finished it became obvious.

Otabek had won, and Yuri didn’t think he was capable of being bitter about it; no, just proud, and slightly smug that he had known this was coming for years where the rest of the world seemed continually baffled by just how incredible Beka was on the ice.

(Paris was always beautiful at night, but it seemed more charming somehow, walking arm in arm with his recent gold medallist best friend, drinking wildly overpriced tourist hot chocolate by Notre Dame, and looked at the city lights twinkling).

 

Yuri is twenty-three years old and he thinks maybe everyone was right—even if he hates it.

It’s been…he doesn’t know how long since Dedushka passed. At least a month, probably more—the days are endless and blur into one another. He sleeps too much and has barely seen the sun since he got back from the funeral—if one more person reaches out and tries to tell him how _sorry_ they are, he thinks he might snap and stab them with his recently abandoned skates.

For all that he should, he doesn’t really feel much of anything about it—there’s just this vast _void_ in his chest that seems to suck everything in, bottomless, endless, taking the good and the bad and everything he’s ever felt for anyone.

Lilia might have been right. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised—Lilia was always right.

She leaves, and he sits on the couch where Beka’s been sleeping the past month—Yuri knows everyone’s been far better to him than they had to. He would never have _asked_ for Otabek to come and keep an eye on him, especially not for this long.

The fact that he’d flown in for the funeral at all had been more than Yuri would have ever asked of him.

“Yura?”

His eyes snap up and he wonders when his senses became so dull, when he became so disjointed from himself that he stopped noticing people coming and going. Stopped noticing anything.

Beka is looking at him with those sad brown eyes, looking worried and fond and endlessly patient. Yuri equal parts loves and hates him for it.

Something breaks.

It takes a minute for him to realise that awful, gut-wrenching sound filling the room is _him,_ tears flowing down his scrunched-up face—no one is a pretty crier at the end of the day, when it really counts—wrapping his arms uselessly around his middle like he was afraid he would shake apart at any moment.

His eyes are too blurred with the tears to see Otabek moves, but he feels the couch dip under his weight, feels the warmth radiating off him even after a walk in the brisk Saint Petersburg air, and Yuri leans into it without thinking. He can’t think. There’s too much that needs to be _felt_ to be _thinking_ about anything.

“I’m not ready for him to be gone.” He chokes out, his hands coming up to cover his face as he’s pulled in—he can’t remember the last time he was held; Yuri was so fucking _difficult_ when it came to affection, and now he regretted that more than ever.

“You were never going to be ready for him to be gone, Yura. He could have lived to be a thousand years old, and you would never have been ready.” Otabek’s voice is low and warm, Yuri feels the rumble of it from where he’s tucked against his chest.

“I still need him.” He cries out pitifully like if he could just come up with a good enough reason, Dedushka would be restored to him—would scold him about not eating enough and sleeping too much, about letting his skates gather dust. About letting himself become so unhappy he had to make himself numb to pretend he wasn’t drowning in it.

“I know.”

“I don’t know what to do without him.”

“You live a life he’d be proud of. The kind of life he wanted for you.”

Now _there_ was a thought.

What kind of life had Dedushka imagined for him?

_One where I’m happy, and safe, and warm. Where I don’t have to worry about money ever; where I get to skate, and where I have people who care about me, people who won’t let me be anything less._

The thought produces a wounded noise and a fresh round of tears, his face turning blotchy and red and his breath ever trying to catch up as he sobs. Otabek rubs his back all the same, and he feels something soft rub against his ankles—Potya. Precious Potya.

“You’re going to be okay, Yura. Maybe not right now, or anytime soon, but you’re going to be okay.”

It wasn’t the first time someone had said as much to him in recent weeks, but it was the first time he’d believed as much.

He’d be okay.

Just not right now.

 

Yuri Plisetsky is twenty-four and about to get into an honest to god fist fight with Otabek Altin, aged twenty-seven.

“You’re not retiring.” Yuri huffs indignantly at him.

Otabek looks equal parts baffled and fond. “That’s not really your choice to make, Yura.”

“I don’t care, I’m vetoing the whole idea, you’re not retiring, you’re just not. Don’t even joke about that.” Yuri went on, arms crossed in front of his chest—he was five seconds away from stomping his foot like a petulant child. Which maybe he was being sort of a child about this—it wouldn’t be the first time, and even if he was,  _fuck it._ It wasn’t happening.

It just wasn’t.

Otabek was _not_ retiring on him now. Absolutely not. It was simply out of the question.

“Yura…” Otabek was even using that voice, the patient one that was reserved for children and Yuri when he was on a rampage.

Which he was.

“No. Don’t even start. You don’t have any major injuries, your skating hasn’t decreased in quality and you still love it—don’t lie to me, I saw you last month at Worlds. You were so _in love_ with being on the ice, it was enough to make me nauseous. You’re not retiring. Not yet anyway. Anything you want to do after skating will still be there after next season.” Rationalising it seemed the way forward—Otabek was a rational sort of person, he figured he’d appreciate the logic.

He did. He looked horribly amused—quirking a brow at Yuri and trying not to smile. A shame. He had a nice smile. Even when that smile was smug and taunting. “Are you proposing a deal then?”

Yuri’s stomach churned. “Yes. One more season. You’re going to skate for one more season and then…and then next year I’ll let you retire and I won’t kick up a fuss. You can retire and become a hermit for all I care. Or take up flamenco dancing. Whatever you want. But after next season. I still need you to be here.”

He had a look on his face that Yuri didn’t quite like—it made him oddly uneasy. “Yuri, I’m still going to be here—maybe not on the ice, but what did you think? I’d retire, and we’d never speak again?”

“No, of course not, you’ve signed a life contract to put up with me—also my cat likes you so even if you _didn’t_ want to put up with me anymore, it’d be too bad because we’re a package deal.” He explained, like it was all totally reasonable—and like Potya and Beka didn’t have some kind of weird love affair going on. “But…you know what it’s like. We’d never see each other during the season. I couldn’t keep justifying coming to visit as _training,_ it’ll just be…different.”

“Different isn’t always a bad thing.” Otabek said, hands tucked in his pockets.

“No, not always. But sometimes it is. And besides, I need time to prepare—you can’t just _drop_ this on me. No, absolutely not. You can wait until next season and then…what the hell are you planning on doing exactly?”

“Music.”

Yuri paused. Alright, that was actually a good answer as much as he didn’t want to admit it.

“Fine. Music will still be there come the end of next season.” Even _that_ deal, however much it might have been Yuri’s idea, made his head spin in the worst way possible. He couldn’t imagine what the podium would be like without his closest friend at his side—couldn’t imagine not sending Beka training videos of him falling on his ass or asking for his help with music or choreography.

Maybe he still could—maybe Beka was right, maybe this didn’t change as much as he thought it did. But it changed enough for it to be _too much_ in Yuri’s mind, too much to handle right now. But next year…next year he could do it. He just needed time to get comfortable with the idea.

He reached for Otabek’s hand, and mercifully was met in the middle. He squeezed it, meeting Beka’s eyes. “One more year.”

Otabek nods, squeezes Yuri’s hand in return.

“One more year.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there you have it folks! The last chapter! I really enjoyed writing this and I'm glad so many of you enjoyed reading it--and hopefully the last chapter was just as fun for you to read as it was for me to write. Otabek and Yuri are always a fave, and there were a thousand more things I wanted to add to this chapter but I didn't want it to be too long compared to the others. But thank you for reading this fic, and leaving comments and kudos, I really appreciate it. Hopefully you'll come back for whatever nonsense I'm writing next.


End file.
